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  1. #76
    Join Date
    Nov 2002
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    I guess I am one of the few who really liked the T-Shirt and Mousepad. Hopefully they will look at something like Cafe Press to offer these in the future.

    I didn't get much benefit from being a premium member, however, I looked at this as nothing more than an investment in to a service I really like to use. Some folks get different things out of being a premium - I got the fact that was I supporting WHT.

    Sirius

    P.S. I really do like the fact that I don't have to wait 90 seconds between posts. That was definately a plus!
    I support the Human Rights Campaign!
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  2. #77
    Join Date
    May 2004
    Location
    Lansing, MI, USA
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    1,548
    Quote Originally Posted by mrzippy
    Cheap service providers that rely exclusively on WHT for clients will likely dry up if they can't post free ads any more.

    You say it like it's a bad thing?


    By the way, never got my shirt/mousepad either.
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  3. #78
    Join Date
    May 2001
    Location
    Dayton, Ohio
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    4,977
    Quote Originally Posted by WO-Jacob
    By the way, never got my shirt/mousepad either.
    You signed up 2/20/2006, you are slated for our next shipment of shirts and mousepads
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  4. #79
    Join Date
    May 2004
    Location
    Lansing, MI, USA
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    1,548
    I was actually referring to the last time... Tis okay though. Can't wait.
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  5. #80
    Join Date
    Sep 2002
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    1,585
    Quote Originally Posted by mrzippy
    Cheap service providers that rely exclusively on WHT for clients will likely dry up if they can't post free ads any more.
    Great! This will leave the real hosts in the industry to post informative (not misleading) product offerings.
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  6. #81
    Join Date
    Feb 2002
    Location
    Australia
    Posts
    24,027
    Quote Originally Posted by mrzippy
    Cheap service providers that rely exclusively on WHT for clients will likely dry up if they can't post free ads any more.
    *Aussie Bob does the dance of joy
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  7. #82
    Join Date
    Sep 2005
    Location
    Albany, NY
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    3,956
    I would also have to agree with the many of you that posted above. Making the ad forums paid is a great idea, whether its per post or per year. Would definitely go a long way on cleaning up the mess that's going on in there right now.
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  8. #83
    Join Date
    Jun 2003
    Location
    Las Vegas, NV
    Posts
    858
    This is what I'd like to see from premium membership:

    1 - Leave the Premium Member bar alone. Some of us enjoy the fact that there is a way to show that we support this community financially. If you have a problem with the terminology "premium member" for some odd reason, get over it. Accept the fact that some of us like to stand out, and having that bar under my name is one way to do it.

    2 - I love being able to hide parts of the site. In fact, I'd like to be able to hide other things as well, like some of the advertisments. Many sites that rely on premium memberships allow you to turn the ads off if you pay to play (Fileplanet is the biggest one I can think of). Maybe ditch something utterly useless like the bottom banners or something to save on page load time.

    3 - I like the idea of making the advertising forums more exclusive. I regularly pay to post on the Sitepoint forums, and would likely do the same here. Ideally, however, what I'd like to see is that premium members get to post once per week at no cost. Regular members get to post once per month for free, but could buy additional posts up to the 1 per week limit at some fixed cost, say $10 or something. That would weed out a lot of the crap in the ad sections, but would sitll allow people to advertise on a regular basis even if they were not a premium member. Obviously, I'd expect the cost of the premium membership to increase to go along with this, but I'm perfectly ok with that. Clearly some people don't have a problem with ROI on paid ads here, otherwise stickies wouldn't be selling for $xxx in some areas, so if you don't want to pay to post, then just stick with your freebies.

    4 - Advertising discounts were huge for me. I paid for my membership a few times over just in the amount I saved on ads over the past couple of years. I can honestly say that getting that discount is what prompted me to advertise with Inet in the first place - I may have tried it eventually, but seeing that discount was what pushed me over the cliff.

    5 - T-Shirts were ok, don't really ever wear mine. I do use both mousepads though. I probably would not buy either from a WHT CafePress store.

    6 - Avatars. I would love to have an avatar.

    7 - More warning points. People who post here a lot or financially support the community should have a bit more leeway when it comes to the content of their posts. I've been hit with warnings a few times for "self promotion" or some other foul when I didn't feel I was doing anything wrong - I never directly solicited any business or anything like that but was still given a warning. The moderator who punished me certainly didn't take the time to explain it further, even when I asked so that I could avoid doing it in the future. The whole warning point system is inherently flawed - it is biased against people who post a lot. For example:

    Member A - He/She posts 10 times a year. He gets warned on 5 of his posts, but because they are spread out through the year, he never gets suspended. He contributes nothing but crap to the community but his access to the site is never affected, even though 50% of what he posted added nothing of value to the community.

    Member B - He/She posts 1000 times a year. Due to the sheer volume of posts, too much coffee, too little sleep from hanging at WHT, or whatever, he goes on a rant and gets warned on a few posts and gets suspended - lets say there are 5 negative posts that cause the suspension. So, even though the "problem posts" are less than 0.5% of the total posting history of this person, their access to the site is removed.

    Can you see how the very nature of the system is unfair to those who post more and gives more of a break to those who post less? That is something that needs to be addressed, IMO.

    8 - Reduce the amount of time between searches and between posts. These are major time savers for some of us. The search thing drives me nuts - I'll do a general search for some topic looking for something, and of course the post on it is 18 pages long. So I go to search for the specific term I'm looking for within that post, only to get "You must wait 18 more minutes before you can search again". Stuff like that really slows down my browsing and drives me crazy. Use some of my "premium member" dollars to add a couple more servers to the cluster so I can search faster, ok?

    I think that's about it....
    Rob Tyree
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  9. #84
    Join Date
    Oct 2005
    Location
    Fleet Street
    Posts
    3,244
    6 - Avatars. I would love to have an avatar.
    I agree with pretty much everything except for this. Avatars are obnoxious and would make the site look like a kiddy playground. Looks much more professional without them.
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  10. #85
    Join Date
    Jun 2003
    Location
    Las Vegas, NV
    Posts
    858
    I'd just like to be able to use my company logo as an avatar. I'm sure you could come up with some reasonable rules to govern their use.

    One other thing I thought of - the limitation of 2 links in your sig could be upped to 4 for premium members - one per sig line. I like being able to share projects I'm working on with people by linking them in my sig.
    Rob Tyree
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  11. #86
    Join Date
    Jun 2001
    Location
    Kalamazoo
    Posts
    33,412
    Quote Originally Posted by Serpico
    I agree with pretty much everything except for this. Avatars are obnoxious and would make the site look like a kiddy playground. Looks much more professional without them.
    Just like signatures, there's an option in your cp to turn them off so you don't see them.
    There is no best host. There is only the host that's best for you.
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  12. #87
    Join Date
    Sep 2004
    Location
    Flint, Michigan
    Posts
    5,766
    Quote Originally Posted by SoftWareRevue
    Just like signatures, there's an option in your cp to turn them off so you don't see them.
    ^^ What he said
    Mike from Zoodia.com
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  13. #88
    Join Date
    May 2004
    Posts
    1,667
    Quote Originally Posted by Rob T
    6 - Avatars. I would love to have an avatar.
    Absolutely not. I can't stand avatars, I hope they are not added. I know you can turn them off, but I'd much rather them just not exist.
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  14. #89
    Join Date
    Sep 2004
    Location
    Flint, Michigan
    Posts
    5,766
    Turn them off and they won't exist. I bet WHT could enable them, make them turned off by default, and until you acme across a thread about it you'd be none the wiser
    Mike from Zoodia.com
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  15. #90
    Join Date
    Jul 2002
    Location
    Victoria, Australia
    Posts
    36,939
    I personally don't think visible differences between Premium and regular members should be allowed. Like avatars and bigger signatures for instance. We have enough reports now to follow without people reporting 4 links in sigs, just to find out it is a premium member. Or if Premium member doesn't show he/she is premium, a warning might ensue or we will get the "nazi mods" rant, because we dared to edit a Premium sig
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  16. #91
    Join Date
    Feb 2002
    Location
    Australia
    Posts
    24,027
    Quote Originally Posted by Rob T
    . . . 6 - Avatars. I would love to have an avatar.
    I totally agree with that. There's no reason why we shouldn't have avatars enabled, but for all WHT members, and not just the Premium member thingie. If folks don't want to see them, then they can disable them from their CP.

    //Bob heads off to lead up the Avatar campaign.
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  17. #92
    Join Date
    Oct 2003
    Location
    Scotland, UK
    Posts
    2,916
    Quote Originally Posted by Rob T
    7 - More warning points. People who post here a lot or financially support the community should have a bit more leeway when it comes to the content of their posts. I've been hit with warnings a few times for "self promotion" or some other foul when I didn't feel I was doing anything wrong - I never directly solicited any business or anything like that but was still given a warning. The moderator who punished me certainly didn't take the time to explain it further, even when I asked so that I could avoid doing it in the future. The whole warning point system is inherently flawed - it is biased against people who post a lot. For example:

    Member A - He/She posts 10 times a year. He gets warned on 5 of his posts, but because they are spread out through the year, he never gets suspended. He contributes nothing but crap to the community but his access to the site is never affected, even though 50% of what he posted added nothing of value to the community.

    Member B - He/She posts 1000 times a year. Due to the sheer volume of posts, too much coffee, too little sleep from hanging at WHT, or whatever, he goes on a rant and gets warned on a few posts and gets suspended - lets say there are 5 negative posts that cause the suspension. So, even though the "problem posts" are less than 0.5% of the total posting history of this person, their access to the site is removed.

    Can you see how the very nature of the system is unfair to those who post more and gives more of a break to those who post less? That is something that needs to be addressed, IMO.
    1-6 and 8 seem fair enough to me.

    Point 7 however...

    This is effectively paying to break the rules, which I can't ever see happening here as there has been discussion about it in the past.

    With the upgrade to VB 3.5, we were manually issuing warnings for a while - we now have a much improved warning system which is much fairer (imo). For the majority of 'first time' offences (depending on the situation), we can issue an 'alert' - no warning points are attached, and it explains what you've done so you can avoid it in the future. Future violations then result in warning points being allocated. We can still use the big bad 'ban' button, but, for those who make the odd slip up, it should mean a much fairer system all round.

    On the flip side, those who post more often here should be more familiar with the rules you agreed to when you signed up. Those who post here a few times a year are most likely to have forgotten something, and thus, more likely to break a rule and get an alert/warning.

    There are also several 'long time' users here who don't have warnings against their name - it's not impossible, as it's mostly common sense anyway
    Alasdair
    Long time ex-host, ex-billing software owner/developer/support staff. Recent lurker.
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  18. #93
    Join Date
    Sep 2004
    Location
    Flint, Michigan
    Posts
    5,766
    tickedon is correct about the warning points. Paying to break the rules is definatley not a good idea. In my 4k+ post I have only recieved two warnings (the second being quite recently). I didn't agree with either of course, but then again I'm not the one having to deal with trying to monitor the huge number of posts that go on at WHT every day so I call it a learning experience and watch myself in the same situation later on It's very easy to avoid getting any points, and extrememly easy to not get banned.
    Mike from Zoodia.com
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  19. #94
    Join Date
    Sep 2003
    Location
    Washington, USA
    Posts
    3,262
    Will the members with current premium membership status be able to continue with the service until this issue is resolved?
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  20. #95
    Join Date
    Jun 2003
    Location
    Las Vegas, NV
    Posts
    858
    I think the whole "paying to break the rules" thing is a vast oversimplification of what I suggested. Nobody is "above the law" so to speak, I'm just saying that people who contribute more, financially or otherwise, have earned more leeway than some guy with 25 posts over 5 years in the ad section, who contributed virtually nothing to the community. I'm not suggesting that people should be able to buy their way out of being banned or something like that, I'm just asking for the community to recoignize and reward my contribution to the community by giving me a bit of flexibility when I might need it.

    Additionally, the whole "warning system" is completely arbitrary and subjective. I've been warned twice over 3 years of hanging out on these boards that I can remember. I had no understanding of how exactly I had broken the rules in either case - I read the rules, read my post, and it just didn't add up. I asked for clarification in both cases, so that I didn't end up with additional violations, and my requests were completely ignored in both cases. There is no real appeal process, and in many cases there is no objective way of determining what was done wrong. Each mod is allowed to interpret the rules in their own way, so what might be seen as a violation by one mod might be perfectly fine by another. Because there is some obvious variation to the system on the moderation side, I just believe that some flexibility should be made avaialble to those who contribute either financially or otherwise on the user side.

    I've never been close to being banned as far as I know, but it would be nice to have some peace of mind knowing that I'm farther from it than someone who doesn't offer any benefit to the community, even if I did effectively buy that privilege.

    Ok, that's all I have to say about that.
    Rob Tyree
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  21. #96
    Join Date
    Jul 2002
    Location
    Victoria, Australia
    Posts
    36,939
    Quote Originally Posted by IncognitoNetworks
    Will the members with current premium membership status be able to continue with the service until this issue is resolved?
    Didn't you read the thread?
    Quote Originally Posted by Troy Augustine
    While we figure out what to do with premium memberships, we have stopped accepting new members and membership renewals. If you are a current premium member, rest assured that you will continue to receive the full benefits of membership. T-shirts are being printed and will be delivered. Premium forums will continue. And... yes... premium members will continue to receive a discount on advertising.
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  22. #97
    Join Date
    Jul 2002
    Location
    Victoria, Australia
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    36,939
    Quote Originally Posted by Rob T
    Additionally, the whole "warning system" is completely arbitrary and subjective. I've been warned twice over 3 years of hanging out on these boards that I can remember. I had no understanding of how exactly I had broken the rules in either case - I read the rules, read my post, and it just didn't add up. I asked for clarification in both cases, so that I didn't end up with additional violations, and my requests were completely ignored in both cases. There is no real appeal process, and in many cases there is no objective way of determining what was done wrong. Each mod is allowed to interpret the rules in their own way, so what might be seen as a violation by one mod might be perfectly fine by another.
    I am not sure how we missed your requests for clarification, but I assure you all are responded to (if we actually receive them).
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  23. #98
    Join Date
    Sep 2002
    Location
    Top Secret
    Posts
    14,134
    Quote Originally Posted by anon-e-mouse
    I am not sure how we missed your requests for clarification, but I assure you all are responded to (if we actually receive them).
    Ooh, Oooh, I can vouch for that
    We may not agree with the decision, but we can actually appeal them too (sometimes it works in your favor ).
    Paying to break the rules, not good. Paying to get "more warning points", not good.

    The rules really aren't that hard to live by, and hey, if you get a warning point or two, who cares!!!. That's why they are called "warnings", not "bannings". It's when you continue to act in a manner that, well, can be questioned, that you find they turn into "bannings"

    Anything that treats the non "premium" members as less than "premium", I'm all against, because it's not appropriate, and that would make a whole nightmare for this place (not that it's not already one )
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  24. #99
    Join Date
    Sep 2002
    Posts
    1,585
    Quote Originally Posted by anon-e-mouse
    I am not sure how we missed your requests for clarification, but I assure you all are responded to (if we actually receive them).
    That is true - when I was banned for 3 months ( - I learnt that I had been rude about a webdesign in the review forum) it was explained to me in a lot of detail. Of course, I didn't want to be banned but fortunately I was in France for several months so I could still view the discussions (and eagerly wait to participate). Paying to break rules really is not fair for everyone and the idea is brought up far too often. I see your point, and I agree with you, but it just won't work.
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  25. #100
    Quote Originally Posted by Aussie Bob
    I totally agree with that. There's no reason why we shouldn't have avatars enabled, but for all WHT members, and not just the Premium member thingie. If folks don't want to see them, then they can disable them from their CP.

    //Bob heads off to lead up the Avatar campaign.
    Aww.. AussieBob, you just want another place to put your smiling mug!



    ------------------

    I don't have a problem to "pay for lesser rules".

    It's not really a matter of "paying to break the rules" as it is a matter of paying to have different rules.
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