Good message boards require people who are willing to post messages to 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 produce effect of a community. The moderator must do his job or board will degenerate into a mess of spam and off-topic junk. Lurkers (people who simply read board without contributing) are not really very useful to board, but they can sometimes be coaxed into contributing.

However, everything is moot without contributors. These are people who actually make a board worth visiting. Good, intelligent contributors who makes posts which have something to do with 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 to board. Simply put, that's what they do. Anyone can post, but not everyone posts well.

Good contributors understand topic of a message board and make sure that their posts are in line with that topic. In fact, excellent contributors not only understand topic, they are fully in tune with purpose and theme of board.

This leads directly to one of most common and most self-destroying sins of them all - that of 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 worst 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 in search engines or been profiled in one of big magazines!

My joy was short lived, however, as I continued reviewing 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 over 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 removed link. If I hadn't looked at reports, though, I may have had a bill of several hundred dollars.

This is an example of one of most common and most difficult to understand sins of 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 over place. Those great Star Trek or Star Wars sites with lots of photos and scripts from 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 but 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.