What is on Your Mind?

I got your point! I will try to contribute

Mariano

Yah... we are a community of like - minded professionals......

I don't think value is added by making the forums a place to login and just start chatting, spamming, link posting, and sending PMs.... what is special about that?

It's taken these restrictions and a custom dynamic learning spam-filter and a dynamic moderation queue to keep the spammers at bay, and even these don't succeed 100%. Spammers are very determined these days. Some even pretend-post actual answers for a little while before they heel-turn and start spamming like mad. It's quite vexing.

Most deleted visitor messages are either spam or inappropriately-placed technical questions. Usually there's a message left stating why it was deleted.

I don't think this will help increase our community, but can we add an article/page about our forum: unix.com in Wikipedia? I think there should be a reference about our knowledge sharing project in a similar project like Wikipedia.

I recently joined. I just found it by googling.

I think the forum is very good. I've enjoyed it, both for learning new things from some really smart people, and trying to contribute my knowledge.

I got an early infraction. The message from the moderator did seem a bit threatening. I "got over it", especially once I learned it will go away, which was not initially explained. Not a big deal, just a misunderstanding. I really appreciate the moderators.

I would only suggest the stock infraction message might say something like the following, which would have worked better in my case:

"It seemed to me you violated Rule X. Here is a link to the policy. Perhaps this might be an innocent mistake on your part, or I have misinterpreted. If you want to send an explanation, that's fine, but it's best we don't get into more discussion on this. I'm just an overworked moderator trying to keep things running smoothly. We want your participation! Just make sure you're careful how you post. This is not a big deal. Assuming there are not recurring problems, your penalty goes away in four weeks."

I sporadically check this forum and to be honest I've never really seen anything that needs changing. I find it refreshing coming here after being on some other forums.

1 . We do not have wiki for our site.
2 . Most of the people are attracted towards user flair that one can place on any website / blog to show off your user profile, reputation etc!, some forum encouraging it, I don't want to take a name of it.