A couple weeks ago I lashed out at people, places and things pretty much everywhere I went. I was so angry and later, depressed, without understanding why.
Giving Tree
Most everyday I get to look at trees out my windows because I live among them and working from home gives me this gift. I consider every tree to be a Giving Tree. When I want to be strong and centered, I visualize being Grandmother Willow, only younger and without gray hair. I want to be tall, graceful, and grounded in the Mother (Earth). Instead of arms, I imagine that my branches are parts of me running around the Internet or the local food store meeting new people and learning a zillion new things. As a tree, I expect to be able to bend during harsh storms or flutter my leaves gently in silent, loving support of everything.
SPAM Lumberhacks
An elegant, wise tree is not something I’ve been lately. After considerable time hiding and feeling miserable about my behavior and locking myself up until I could be the Tree, I came to understand one of the things that has been hurting me, and I felt that perhaps I could share that with you.
As the owner and lead Administrator for a volunteer-run, non-profit forums, I get what I thought was a birds eye view of the Internet. I figured that since Cre8asiteforums was global and targeted web development and all things related to that, I would have a constant finger on the pulse of what’s happening out there. I was wrong about that and many people corrected my thinking. I may not have responded to it all, but I was listening.
Every single day I have to check into the forums. Holidays, weekends, vacation. Sometimes there is someone to back me but I hate to bother anyone for help. It’s volunteer. Nobody HAS to be there, not even the Moderators. It’s a Community. Well, it was. In its heyday. But like a tree, there are seasons and changes. Some years there were industry well-known mentors who came often to teach and help with questions. They can’t have been expected to be there from 1998 until 2010. As much as we miss them and their contributions, they may not ever return. They have their own businesses and commitments now.
Imagine what it’s like to build something for everybody, only to be forced to tolerate a daily, non-stop barrage of people trying to break into it so they can do some type of damage. This is what spammers do.
Every single day I am met with a minimum of 50 spammers at the forums. With a blog, most spam is caught and whatever is not can be deleted fast and easily. A blog owner can tell what is spam and kill it on sight or just let it sit there until they come in to moderate the day’s posts before they permit any of them out front to the public. With a forums, it’s different. The procedures vary. Cre8asiteforums is extremely strict about who gets in because the Community expects us to keep the conversation intelligent and productive.
So for us, every new member has to be validated before they are admitted. Of, say, 500 new member candidates every week, maybe 3 will be real people who want to be there. Of that 3, one of them will ignore our rules and spam the Community or leave a stream of 1-liners with a link to their website in the post. Funnily enough, they never complain when their posts are all removed and their account disabled. What they don’t seem to understand is that if they come to my place and break the furniture, I turn them into a spammers database to warn all the other forums out there. I report spammers every day, including weekends.
During the past few weeks I came to understand the impact of dealing with daily SEO spam was chipping away at me . I realized I hated the industry I was associated with because it’s filled with people who think spam is marketing. I learned that I’m not alone in feeling that way. I stopped being able to focus on anything. I was utterly and completely spent, with nothing else to give. When you devote yourself to something for a long time, only to wake up to find there is no place for you and the house looks completely different, it hurts. Every day my blog is spammed with one-liners and url drops that never see the light of day. Who are the stupid people who think this is doing their sites any good? What myth is this one?
My idealist little brain has such a hard time accepting some of what’s happening out there in Web LA LA Land. Facebook absolutely has no interest in anything other than using members for its own gain. Google is no privacy saint. Internet marketing has become a game of who can rip off the most and get away with it. Every fight leads to links, so that’s a good thing because links are more valuable than people.
For the last several weeks I’ve questioned everything regarding my career. It’s an odd feeling sensing what I want, but I have no clue what that translates into in practical, making a living terms.
I want to be the tree where birds come to nest and sing.
13 Comments
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Jaded much?
I feel your pain. We locked our forum down for the same reason about a year ago with the plan of deciding what to do with it later. Never got around to it.
The thing is, there will be scum bags in every industry. The people who spam your forums/blogs/etc. are no different than those at kiosks at the mall who see you talking on a cell phone but still try to sell you one. It’s the people, not the industry.
It is because of people like that, that people who teach ethical marketing and SEO have to keep it up. Because if we want to make the world a better place, we have to keep reaching people one at a time, helping them counter their own effects from that nasty barrage. Spam hurts businesses too. Makes it harder for the legit ones to compete and find cost effective marketing methods, because everything that WORKS is quickly overrun with inconsiderate and unintelligent people who think there is a shortcut. That hurts the neediest of startups. Those that need to start up mostly on work, and drive, and determination.
That is what gets me back up every time I am close to burnout. And it happens a lot. It may be too big to fight. But you can still make a difference, one person at a time.
So sorry to hear that u have been worn down so much, I hope you can find the time and right activity to recharge and remember you are awesome!
Unfortunately money makes the world go ’round. And most will do absolutely anything to get it – integrity be damned. That’s also why those with hearts, souls and a conscience very seldom become financially wealthy.
Those willing to sell their souls and “succeed” by any means necessary defend their actions by hiding behind catch phrases like “it’s a dog eat dog world”, “the ends justify the means” and “it’s just business”. That perspective allows them to somehow separate who they are from what they do…at least in their own minds.
The recent Senate hearings featuring Wall Street executives (and most recently, the execs from BP and TransOcean) are perfect examples of that psychological detachment. Each displayed a complete inability to recognize that while what you do may not define who you are, how you do it most certainly does. The fact that they’ve got millions – sometimes billions – in net worth is proof enough for them that what they’re doing must be okay.
The world we live in makes me want to find a deserted island somewhere and create my very own tiny existence & simple life. But since I’m unwilling to sell my soul, destroy others or prey on ignorance in the name of marketing, I’ll never be able to afford my own island. How that for a conundrum??
I hear ya Aly! I’m one of those persons who has been using and making a living via the Internet for 15 years and all I can say is that it has grown into a monster. This is NOT what I wanted to be part of. I’m finding I need to be off-line more often, for my own sanity.
@Lauren, I agree with you. However, I’ve operated an educational forums since 1998, believing that reaching out to folks, one at a time if necessary, would help. Now I’m learning that those who want to learn ethical, logical practices are in the minority. It’s been discouraging. I hope people like you keep trying.
@David, thank you. I really appreciate your words and confidence in me. I really appreciate it.
@Jeremy wrote, “It’s the people, not the industry.” Jaded, yes. The bulk of the work I get is from companies who have been ripped off by SEO’s. They’re very jittery and I’m tired of defending the industry. In-house SEO’s seem to be the ethical, skilled ones.
We find that our clients who use PHPBB have way more problems with this than those who use other solutions. There are tons of bot scripts out there for exploiting and auto-submitting to PHPBB – one bot attacking your site can appear to be hundreds of users per day, when in fact, it is not (99% of spam originates from just 100 known criminal entities who program bots to do the dirty work – that comes from the FBI, and is true of forum and link spam, as well as email spam). Using a lesser known forum platform can really slow down the spam registrations. We often use Kunena inside Joomla, and if you set up Community Builder to handle the registrations, you can set a verification question that has a specific required answer, and that stops the bots cold. We’ve had 100% relief from bot submissions using that, and there are other similar solutions that work just as well.
Human submitters are the minority, and are a manageable problem (they are usually stupid people – so you can usually block them – some are stupid AND persistent, but you can still stop them). Bots are what usually completely overwhelm you. And Bots ARE controllable. The main thing with PHPBB is to lock it down BEFORE you go live. Because the bots will come in and the FIRST time they hit your site, they check to see if they can get in. If they can, they just hammer away at you forever – they NEVER re-check after that to see if the registration and post process is getting anywhere, they just keep mindlessly pounding you, and notifying their buddies to do the same. Locking it down to begin with cuts out a lot of that, though not all with PHPBB simply because so many bots go looking for PHPBB.
And I think it is worth continuing to work at helping others, because there are a lot who really do want to know, and are willing to learn. I have the best clients in the world, and a thriving business, and so do my Webmaster students, and they seek out the same kind of people as clients that I do. So there is a very large market base of people who want to know and want to do it right.
It seems like there are millions who are ignorant and unethical, but that isn’t true. There are actually a few thousand who program a LOT of bots (some basely criminal, some overseas “SEO” companies selling fraudulent services), which give the impression of millions simply because bots are so fast and so aggressive. Then there are another few thousand who are running around spamming forums because they’ve been told that is how you market, but they usually stop after they discover it does not work (the smart ones, anyway).
I completely understand your frustration, but I would also like to remind you that the people who participate in your forum are very aware that it is one of the few remaining good ones in our industry. It really does have a good signal-to-noise ratio compared to 90% of the others out there.
You’re definitely not fighting a losing battle.
Is there an ability to put more stringent filters on your forum? So for the SEOers, it’s all about getting links. Couldn’t you for instance limit the first 10 posts of a person to not be able to link to anything and thus help eliminate the spammers on your site?
@Kirill We’ve already learned what they do with that type of filter or rule. They leave 10 or so posts of just one-liners, sometimes responding to old threads to do it, and then when they get to their quota, start spamming. We remove one-liners where its obvious they are not contributing to the discussion. Our forums is not for links. It’s for discussions and Q & A. We enforce that.
@Laura Thank you for your comments and kindness in sharing. Cre8asiteforums uses Invision software. We already have a double captcha, including a question that needs to be answered (that we make up). Even after all that, we get the volume that gets past all our preventative measures. This is why we now manually check everyone.
Great post! Comment spam is the bane of bloggers. It hurts the user experience, takes up space you need for other things, and can even adversely affect your ranking in the search engines.
The joys of remaining subscribed to comments. The post above mine might be the funniest thing I’ve seen this week.