Do big boards tend to overdo it on the rules?

As in, why does it seem a lot of larger forums are overly strict on things like signatures and links to external sites? It's fine to go around banning people for making topics about other websites and trying to send people PMs begging them to join your own site, but simply for linking to others site in your signatures or being associated with competitors?

Is it because a lot of larger forums are terrified of competition, terrified that people might actually outdo them or that people might find out competitors actually exist?

Heck, we all know one site which does all the above (*cough* TAZ *cough*), but it seems like it's more and more seen as common practice for large forums nowadays.

What do you think?

 

Well... there is a difference between having strict rules and having idiotic rules. What you are talking about is simply idiotic rules. Being forced to have *strict* is an unfortunate byproduct of growing. The larger you get, the more people are trying to spam your site, troll users, etc. But certainly doesn't mean you need idiotic rules.

 

That does sound idiotic.

But one site that i can not stand and really pisses me off is WHT.
I don't care for some of their admins and it's funny how "respected" members of the site are allowed to trash and be downright nasty to other members but other members committing the same offenses are usually banned.

Bad experiences with that site and their rules.....I use TAZ but not much. It'ts not as fun as AT or Adex.

 

I don't think it's just big boards. I think it's more about individual boards who insist on having really strict or overly done rules. Your example was of a big board, but I've seen some smaller ones with equally as restrictive rules before and it's just not justified usually.

 

I don't think its about worrying about competitors so much that they'd rather limit discussion to the what they offer. Competitors posting their urls and site links? You might get more traffic and content in the long run. Because, if you allow them to express themselves - without always promoting their forum - you might have a better- more relaxed community in the end.

Strict rules, such as "No you can't post a link to your admin forum" - which we all know TheAdminZone does, they should offer it because they are a webmaster/admin community - and admin forum owners are still apart of the community, you just out them out of the community really.. What's the point of that?

Sounds like their staff team playing favorites to me.

 

I think for big boards it's just a matter of setting up a process to streamline everything so moderators always know what to do and can do so quickly. On high traffic communities mods don't have the time to handhold everyone as they do on smaller sites.

As my forum has grown I'm a lot more itchy on the spam ban. Come in and promote your service without at least asking you're going to be spam banned. We're pretty lax on signatures once you have a certain amount of posts but then again we're not a Webmaster forum where everyone and their mother is an "SEO expert" spamming links.

As for prohibiting links to certain types of sites (mainly competitors) except the usual porn, gambling, and illegal stuff. I won't bother with forums who's admins are that shortsighted .

 

Really, I don't see anything wrong with people linking to outside forums in their signature. If the user is helpful, why not give them the leverage of using their signature space to promote their forum? TAZ doesn't allow that either. But, let's take a look at Forum Promotion - they allow users to post all types of forums on their community - doesn't matter what type of forum it is, and owners use that to their advantage by advertising their admin forums there.

However, let's say a Forum Promotion member found TAZ and decided to do the same thing - their URL will probably get blocked, user banned, and signature links removed. They don't embrace their competitors because I guess they feel like allowing discussion of competitors won't do anything for them - just hurt them.

That's probably why there's so many Promotion forums out there, people think that others advertising their site = good content in the long, but what does everyone think?

So, with that being said - what if a user wants a review of their admin forum and is looking to improve it? TAZ's reviewers won't do it, because after all, even the small admin forum is in competition with them as is. It's kind of ridiculous because when you've been around that long - why worry about your users leaving to a newer site? Especially if the content isn't as good as yours.

I know I used and still do block the discussion of my competitors of my community - that's because their owners thought it was cool to spam my member's private messages - running through everyone on our online list. I didn't want to fuel the fire anymore, so I just stopped their discussion, and its in my community rules

So we do allow it, just don't allow the spam that comes with it.

This rule has helped a lot because those forums are no longer active, and strived to take our members - when they weren't exactly doing anything for our members - in terms of providing better content, being more helpful, and being there for the members.

 

As you grow your community, so the numbers of people who try to abuse it grows. You'll have all kinds of 'seo specialists' coming to post crap, just to plug in their links, images in signatures (if you allow it) will start dragging your bandwidth etc. A small forum deals with less jerks, so it's normal to be more relaxed. But, as you grow, you need to tighten the guidelines, otherwise it's chaos.

As for the 'idiotic' guidelines, to be honest, it's their kitchen, their game. I mean, if I was the leader in my niche and was bombed with all kinds of 'admin forum' wannabies, I'd probably start having an attitude. There's a gazillion of 'new' forums open in this niche and 99.9% die in the first 3 months. And all trying to get an edge by promoting in their community. not that it helps, since most fold out in under 3-6 months anyway.

 

Yeah... absolutely. Obviously "idiotic" is subjective and I'm sure some people think some of our rules are idiotic (like not allowing duplicate accounts) for one reason or another.

But that being said, if we actually had rules that you can't post links to competitors or similar things, well... in the end it's just more work for us to try and enforce those rules and really not *for* any purpose. If a competitor is going to rise up and overtake you, it's because of something you aren't doing or something they *are* doing, but not because they slung a couple links on your site. I suspect most of our competitors are actually active members on our site and a good number are even premium/paying members on our site.

For me, it's far more productive to work on making my site better vs. trying to figure out ways to stay on top by hurting competitors.

 

You know when I write policies for my forum, competition is never in my mind. I write my policies to abide by laws. I could care less if competition joins my site and links just so long as I can do the same... I mean if they don't allow my link on their forum, then it would be fair to not allow theirs right? Thoughts about that?

Now I dont have a big board yet by all means but when I do (not if, when ), the same rules will apply, mark my words