Message Boards: The Job Of The Contributor

Written by Richard Lowe


One ofrepparttar most wonderful things inrepparttar 119047 world is to be part of a lively, useful internet community. Good message boards (and their close cousins newsgroups and email lists) are a great way to build such a community. In fact, a message board is a good idea on just about any web site as long as it is properly controlled, defined and moderated.

Good message boards require people who are willing to post messages torepparttar 119048 board. In fact, an empty message board is of no use to anyone as it performs no purpose at all.

There are many people who have to work together, usually unconsciously, in order to make a message board actually work and producerepparttar 119049 effect of a community. The moderator must do his job or repparttar 119050 board will degenerate into a mess of spam and off-topic junk. Lurkers (people who simply readrepparttar 119051 board without contributing) are not really very useful torepparttar 119052 board, but they can sometimes be coaxed into contributing.

However, everything is moot without contributors. These arerepparttar 119053 people who actually make a board worth visiting. Good, intelligent contributors who makes posts which have something to do withrepparttar 119054 subject at hand are rare, and a board with more than a couple of them is worth it's weight in gold.

So what does a contributor do, anyway? Well, he or she posts messages torepparttar 119055 board. Simply put, that's what they do. Anyone can post, but not everyone posts well.

Good contributors understandrepparttar 119056 topic of a message board and make sure that their posts are in line with that topic. In fact, excellent contributors not only understandrepparttar 119057 topic, they are fully in tune withrepparttar 119058 purpose and theme ofrepparttar 119059 board.

One ofrepparttar 119060 jobs of a contributor is to makerepparttar 119061 board enjoyable to everyone who readsrepparttar 119062 messages. Good contributors never flame anyone, no matter whatrepparttar 119063 temptation, andrepparttar 119064 best contributors go out of their way to show respect for other contributors,repparttar 119065 moderator and anyone who might be readingrepparttar 119066 messages.

Sins of the Internet

Written by Richard Lowe


One ofrepparttar most common misconceptions among new (and sometimes advanced) internet users is that "if you can grab something it must be free". Add to that a touch of naiveté and a hunger for cash or fame, and you've got a formula for disaster ... or at least for some sins.

This leads directly to one ofrepparttar 119046 most common and most self-destroying sins of them all - that ofrepparttar 119047 Signup Junkie. Just about everyone that I know went through this phase - it's typical for most newbies. They sign up for everything. Why? Because so many companies and organizations make promises which seem to offer solutions, riches and help that it's hard to resist. The end result is, at best, lots of useless spam and at worstrepparttar 119048 loss of lots of money, time and effort.

Other sins are more subtle. For example, one day I was looking at my site statistics when I noticed something very unusual. My bandwidth usage was way too high. You see, my site had been doing about 15gb a month, which is about 500 mb/day. Suddenly my daily report showed my site was doing 2gb/day! At first I was thrilled - my site must have gotten a great ranking inrepparttar 119049 search engines or been profiled in one ofrepparttar 119050 big magazines!

My joy was short lived, however, as I continued reviewingrepparttar 119051 report. I soon realized that my site was not more popular - someone had linked directly to one of my images. It was a very high traffic site so every time this page was displayed it hit my site - hammered it hard. If it kept up it became obvious that I was going to get charged for bandwidth overcharges, and it would not be a small bill.

You see, webmasters usually pay a fixed fee for their bandwidth usage up to a certain amount. In my case, it was 27gb/month. Any usage over that amount costs a small fortune, somewhere between $6 and $20 per gigabyte overrepparttar 119052 ceiling.

I was glad that I looked at my statistics because I was able to do something about it. I added a few lines to my htaccess file and more or less removedrepparttar 119053 link. If I hadn't looked atrepparttar 119054 reports, though, I may have had a bill of several hundred dollars.

This is an example of one ofrepparttar 119055 most common and most difficult to understand sins ofrepparttar 119056 internet. It's called bandwidth stealing, and it's just theft, plain and simple.

One very popular sin is that of copyright infringement. You know what I'm talking about - you've seen it all overrepparttar 119057 place. Those great Star Trek or Star Wars sites with lots of photos and scripts fromrepparttar 119058 series? Guess what, they are infringing upon other's copyrights.

Spamming is very popular, and a great way to lose friends, make enemies and generally annoy people. It's not a wonderful way to make any money, as all butrepparttar 119059 truly naive hate spam and delete it immediately without reading. Spamming is a sin and has more or less lost it's usefulness long ago.

A more obscure but still popular sin is that of spammingrepparttar 119060 search engines. You see, search engines try really hard to present useful information to their users. However, some poor misguided souls want to manipulaterepparttar 119061 system to cause their own sites to appear higher inrepparttar 119062 results list (and thus get more hits). They do all kinds of strange things to foolrepparttar 119063 little search robots, then curse when their sites are dropped forever.

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