The problem with all the Webmaster Forums - Their Policies on putting Links in Posts

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We all hate spam, I too. In one of my site, I get daily 300 spam comments(thanks to Akismet, I don't have to spend more than 2 minute to clean it though). But this post is not as much about Spam Comments as about webmaster forum boards policies on them.

Here is a little example of it - On V7n I had posted the link of my PHP Frameworks posts which I feels has lot of insight as far as PHP based frameworks are concerned. People like Nate(Original CakePHP Developer) and Josh (Madeam Creator) had put there comments on it and it has great discussion on MVC as well as on CakePHP. Now, the Mods removed that link saying I was spamming Spamming ??? Probably I should not have said that "In my Blog" at the end of the first post. If I had not said that thing, Mods most likely wouldn't had removed the link.

So now the definition of spamming has become to NOT to put your own blog links in there forum no matter how good the article is ? Well I used to think the definition of spam links in forums is "Low quality non relevant links" ?

Anyway this is Not only about V7n, almost every webmaster forum does this. Mods see the post has a link to some blog and immediately removes it saying it is spam and against rules. If you want, write the content here! (like others have nothing else to do). IMO, only that forums get on top who give something in return to the members.

I know there will always be members, who take time from there schedule and share knowledge and who post to help others but such people won't be more than few dozens. So if you really want to get your forum going, give the member something(in this case a link) if he is sharing his knowledge. And judge links by there quality only. Removing good links all together means that you are depriving the community with informative content.

Anyway here are my suggestions to Scott (V7n owner) and to any other webmaster forum owner. DO NOT remove links unless they look really spammy, irrelevant and don't have any value to your community members.

If you really feels like you can't give a live link to them, than you can do one of the 3 things -

1. Remove the http://www. part and keep it as text link. DO NOT remove the link altogether. You never know, any information can be useful to your Community members.

2. If you have some real issues than you can use link redirection like WebmasterWorld. Make all the links like http://www.example.com/?url=http://www.linkposted.com. VB has this feature, so it can be easily used with little tweaks.

3. Use NO Follow or javascript - You can make the link as NO FOLLOW or use some kind of javascript code to remove any kind of getting them associated with your site.

So in short, Internet is all about interlinking and passing information, so make sure your community member do not looses on some nice piece of knowledge and information because someone has put his blog link in the thread

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