It is nice to see some genuine feedback. THANK YOU.
RJ,
I have to agree with one of the members, we should make membership on this forum paid. Like dnf, this way scammers will expose their paypal, or form of payment and if the payment is reversed then NP will know their scammers and close their account.
We should as a community stand by one another and support NP.
Thank you for that. I agree, the NamePros community spirit is all about standing together, helping each another when we can, sharing our knowledge, reviews, appraisals, being professional in our dealings, and always giving back to the community. That's how I define a :great:
It's true, member retention and quality participation will be better (on a per-member basis) on a paid board because people are more "invested". I'm sure moderation is a lot easier on a closed/paid forum also.
People act their best and network their arses off at TRAFFIC because they spent $3k to be there and want to see a return on it. If it was free to be there, the crowd and their behavior would be completely different. That's not a good thing nor a bad. Some people prefer closed/secret/paid communities, others prefer an open/free model.
For me it feels completely out of place to think of NamePros being a paid community. We would miss out on a lot of diversity with new members; the loss of many potentially excellent NamePros members who never join because there was a fee involved. This site is seven years old now. We have members who joined here when they were kids in high school and are now among the titans of this industry. Other guys like Dave Gridley who like to keep us entertained with new threads in The Break Room. These are members who are valued in the NP community and I hate to think we would lose people like that by becoming a paid site.
We do have a
Supporter option for members who wish to support NamePros with a paid membership. It has not been a hugely popular option since we introduced it, but it is there and Rachel & I do very much appreciate those Supporting and Business Members that help us keep the lights turned on at NamePros.
If you are in favor of paid memberships, you could better avoid scammers by insisting on only dealing with other NamePros members who are also Paid Supporters. There is a badge in the member's postbit and profile where you can see their Supporter or Business Member status.
I will leave. If that matters.
Pay or no pay has nothing to do with paying to be a member.
If the reason was that RJ was going broke or losing money - that's a different issue.
Yes, it would matter to me if we lost you as a member. As I was just commenting above, I would hate to lose potentially good members because we decided to charge a fee to everyone.
I am genuinely interested why it is important in your decision making wheather I am going broke or losing money. Can you elaborate?
NamePros is self-sustaining now, but there have been several uncomfortable stretches of time where I was losing money running this forum. Advertisements didn't cover expenses.
The reality is domainers just don't click on Adsense ads. I don't know who actually does, but I would hug them if I could (and not have to worry about giving too many hugs!) PPC is among the worst types of income to depend on.
1. I would like to see SMS verification (like sedo does) for users who want to post in the domain sales section at namepros.
This is new to me. I will Google about SMS verification, but let me know if you have any tips or resources to point me to. Sounds interesting, maybe as an added optional layer of security.
2. I also would like to see a small NP$ fee for opening threads in the sales section.
SitePoint does something like that, charging fees to start threads selling domains or websites. It would surely decrease the number of sales threads. I'm not sure if this would work at NamePros. I would like to hear more feedback about this.
3. I would like to see a links directory where NP members would submit links and vote for them. For instance I would like to see a directory for domain registrars and another directory for hosting companies. Members should be able to vote and submit links.
This could be a list like domaining.com does but with the option for namepros members to vote and add list items. For instance what are best domainer blogs, best parking companies, best registrars, best hosts etc? Nobody knows. This is called collective intelligence and used by sites like digg and delicious.
I like this idea and the idea of letting members submit and vote on links. We have discussed doing a Business Directory before and it's overdue that we do something like this.
This reminds me, I also want to get our Registrar Review section updated and add a section like that for Monetization Services and Website Developers.
4. I would like to see a videos section where members would be add domain videos.
Like a gallery of NamePros created YouTube Videos? Tutorials and such?
5. For supporter and business accounts video embedding and image tags could be allowed to forum posts.
Good suggestion, I will try to implement this ASAP.
6. I had too much problem upgrading from supporter to business member. Still it is not fixed. I think
the order of actions needs to changed for this case. I would suggest first cancelling the supporter account and issuing a partial refund for unused time.
Agreed. We need to improve this.
7. NP administration and moderators are like a small team acting together against the members. This is maybe not the best way of doing things. Some moderators are too harsh.
I have been away from active moderator duty for some time. Being a moderator is not always easy on a forum of this size. The rules are posted for everyone to read and follow. If rules are not being applied fairly, or if the rule itself is too harsh please let myself or NPQueen know.
8. The community spirit is poor. Some community action and boycotts can be organised against some companies. For instance Enom has just suspended a pharma domain after making a deal with an organisation that represents the industry. The registrars are going to make deals with music or fashion industry and they will suspend generic domains without warning. Many domainers could lose their generic domains because of these suspensions.
Another example would be intrustdomains.com who lets you backorder domains but when they catch it they keep the domain for themselves and list it for sale on their site. There are too many things messed up in this industry. There are a lot of unjustified wipo cases. I would like to see some articles or site news outside the forum area about these.
Let's do something exciting as a community. For instance the Kentucky gambling domain case is disturbing. Let's organise some community action against that.
A united NamePros community could serve as a big voice in the domain industry. I am all in favor of members organizing on the forums to bring change to the business. What can we do to encourage this?
9. You have a section for suggestions which I used multiple times but then gave up because nobody cares. It would be great if those suggestions can be made into a list and users can add new items and vote for existing items.
For instance I want "Automatically retrieve titles from external links" to be removed as default when posting forum messages. It is an annoying feature. A lot of members would agree if they were aware that this is what annoys them all the time.
Noted.
10. A wiki section could be created and a team of experts could be assigned to different sections. So when somebody asks what pending delete means it should be possible to give a link where they can read and watch a video about this and see related subjects and related discussions (hand picked from forum topics).
This would be an excellent addition.
11. I suggest a new user group called "editors". These could be selected forum members who have good knowledge in certain areas. It would be expected from editors that they have good knowledge in their field, they are willing share information and help people, they use a proper language and punctuation when writing. In return editors could be given some extra features that is available to business members.
This is similar to how I envisioned our moderation team operating in the discussion forums, as experts leading the discussions in their respective categories.
12. What happened to namepros radio? This was a good idea. I would like to see some expert talking about this weeks subjects. Then those sound files could be archived somewhere accessible. Maybe the name could be changed from namepros radio to namepros podcast or domainer podcast.
It was a time consuming task to keep generating new programming on a regular basis. As much as I would love to get it going again, I don't see it happening on our current budget.
I'm not sure how making membership paid for is going to solve much, it may even kill of the community to only loyal members drying up domain buyers and sellers who don't want to pay to post on the forums. I know a lot of people want live auctions back and that could be a positive thing to bring back, and maybe instead of saying thanks for the feedback, maybe act upon some of it
Live auctions are great and I've had several requests to bring them back. I hope to be able to do them again soon.
Small NP$ fee wont solve anything ethir.
To big and people wont post, drying up sellers and therefore buyers.
To small and it wont prevent anything because you can earn it within a few mins.
SMS verification is a bit unfair to the members who don't own mobile phones.
SMS verification is a very good strategy because:
1. Scammers who try to sell stolen domains would not continuously come back with new namepros accounts so easily because they would need a new mobile phone number for each account. It would be discouraging for them. Most of them would post in other forums.
2. Ordinary members would post more carefully trying to avoid bad language because they wouldn't want to lose their namepros account even if it was created yesterday because it would be more difficult to open a new account.
The idea is that somehow you need to avoid a troubled user just to create another account and come back over and over again. Currently if you spot somebody selling stolen domains and suspend his account, the person can easily create another account in seconds.
Good discussion about SMS and the problem of duplicate accounts. Going to go look into it now.
RJ
---------- Post added at 06:49 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:38 PM ----------
hollywood, I know we had the privacy option to hide your DOB from the date we added the age restrictions on adult forums. If there was a breakdown in our scripts, this is the first I have heard.
