This takes up time. Time I could be spending with more valuable contributions to the forum. I could write more valuable posts. I could add more functionality that would be helpful to users.  I could write more blog posts. I could write more articles for A Padded Cell. I could clean my house.

The topic of SEO

Most of these spammy posts come in the SEO and Marketing forums. I suspect that many of these people work for those companies that send you unsolicited email telling you that they can get your site to the “top of Google”. Unfortunately, many unsuspecting website owners fall for that.

These people think that forum signatures are a good way to get backlinks, and they have a tiny bit of knowledge of SEO (seeing as how they work for an “SEO company”), so they post a bunch of crappy posts in our forum. Thus, our forum becomes filled with crappy SEO posts.

We don’t want to be an SEO forum!

We don’t! And yet, because we rank well for “Webmaster Forums”, this is what we have become. If given the choice, we wouldn’t call that. This is a legacy thing for us. This forum was started back in the 90′s. It was one of the first forums of it’s kind. In those days, SEO was only one of the many things as “webmaster” might do. In those days, web people weren’t nearly as specialized as we are now.

What I’d really like to do is ditch the Webmaster Forums domain and  merge everything into A Padded Cell. Then we might have a better chance of attracting the kind of members we want. The problem is that we’re currently first in Google UK for “webmaster forums” and second in Google Canada. How can you abandon a #1 ranking in Google?

Where do these people come from?

We have noticed that the majority of these spammy posts come from South- and South-East Asia. Normally I’m a big fan of diversity. It’s always been one of the strengths of our community. But this is starting to become a bit of an issue. Lately they’re even becoming more open about where they’re from. They used to say they were from the US or Britain, but now they’ll be honest (which I don’t mind, because lying about where they’re from really annoyed me).

Why is it an issue? Well, mainly because I think it can be off-putting to other members. They may think that everyone in our forum is from these regions and therefore they don’t fit in. These members don’t write English very well and their posts often don’t make sense. They also tend to use wording that would seem strange to native English speakers (e.g. calling other members “dear”). Add this to the fact that the actual content of these posts is not very strong.

All of this would be fine in smaller amounts, but when the majority of our posts have one or more of these issues it tends to lower the quality of the forum overall. If the quality of the post content was better none of this would be a problem.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that all members from South-east Asia are problems. They’re not.  We have some very good members from that part of the world. It just so happens that most of the spam comes from there too.

Do people even want to talk about design & development?

It seems that few people want to talk about anything other than SEO. I was wondering what it is about these topics that make them more popular than others. There are a few factors that could contribute to that:

• In design & development, forums aren’t that important. I imagine there are a lot of designers and developers who have never participated in a forum community. In SEO and Marketing, the opposite is true. Forums are an important part of the professional community, and there are a lot of them. In comparison, there are relatively few forums that focus more on design and/or development. Why is that? Do people just not want to talk about web design? I actually think that the SEO community overall is much stronger than the design and development communities (but that might be a topic for another post!).
• SEO is easy to talk about. It’s easy for people to have an opinion about simple questions like how to improve your site ranking (not that these opinions are necessarily good ones!). It’s also easy to articulate what these techniques are. How do you explain a process of problem solving in design or programming? How do you explain a design approach that is innate?
• Design & development questions often don’t prompt ongoing discussion. A question on SEO, such as “how do I get more traffic” can get a lot of responses over time. In contrast, design and development qustions are often very specific. This doesn’t line up in IE6. How do I fix this code? They don’t need answers from multiple people, let alone an ongoing discussion. Once the problem is solved the topic is over.

We are also targetting a more beginner level audience. These people don’t live and breathe web design like the professionals do. It might be a hobby, or a tiny part of their job. They might just be starting out in the profession. Engaging these users is tough. Currently I am reading the Art of Community by Jono Bacon and it’s giving me a lot of ideas.

The sentimental value

I met my husband on this forum. I have spent a tremendous amount of time over the years posting, deleting spam, and otherwise improving the place. This alone is the main reason why I keep doing this.

In the relatively near future every website will be a dynamically-generated web application and all of today’s sites built on multiple static pages will be ripped out and replaced.

I was trying to explain this to people in a meeting a few weeks ago. Static files clearly can’t handle the demands of todays websites. Even attempting to build in your own functionality by coding your own php is fraught with problems. Why should you do it yourself when you could just use (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, your CMS of choice)?

Will there become a time when nobody publishes static html files anymore? Will new designers jump right into WordPress instead of building static websites first? An intersting topic to ponder.

Front and centre, just under the search box. Now, I don’t know if this is always there… for some reason I think it might be a standard, but the recent rise in the value of the Canadian dollar changes everything. As of this morning, the Canadian dollar is valued at almost $1.04 US ($1.0382 to be more precise). This means that online shopping is a lot more attractive than it used to be when our dollar was worth 80¢. We don’t want to go to Amazon.ca where our dollar is worth $1, we want to shop at Amazon.com where it’s worth $1.04 (or $1.06 as it was last week).

To add to that, book prices are stuck where they were months ago when the books were printed. This means that the price for most books is $2-$4 higher on the Canadian site, if not more (I think Amazon may have adjusted these prices for the dollar value already). Buy a few books and you’ve covered the $5 + tax Canada Customs charges at the border (don’t get me started on that!). Oh, and I think the limit to qualify for free shipping is lower on the US site.

Another problem, which always applies to Amazon, is that the US site has a much broader product range than the Canadian version does, plus all those affiliated sellers. I can get a lot of stuff on Amazon.com that isn’t available in Canada at all. That’s why I want to shop there now.

For anyone running a US eCommerce site, now is the time to optimize your site for Canadian shoppers. Do you ship to Canada? Are the rates reasonable? You could even put up a little Canadian flag to welcome your neighbours from the North

Who just surfs the web anymore anyway? There’s so much crap out there, I can’t be bothered to sort through it. But I still like the web. I want to look at websites. I see a lot of websites and subscribe to a lot of feeds, but it’s just boring somehow. What sets StumbleUpon apart from other aggregation sites is that it’s just more fun! The randomness makes it entertaining, and you can pick from a wide range of topics. I don’t have to look at just tech news and even on that topic I’ve come across a ton of neat stuff I never would have found elsehwere.

That’s my 2 thumbs up for StumbleUpon What about you? Have you tried it or are you more into a different bookmarking site?

Midway through the article Eric asks: ”So is the gender imbalance in the eye of the organizers, or is it in the very fabric of the industry?”

Think about the sites you visit to learn about web design. They’re probably all run by men, right? What about the blogs you read, or the forums you post to. If you’ve been to TWF you’ll know who I am but I’m guessing the majority of others are dominated by men.

Why is that? Why is all the web design help and information created by men? Granted, you can pick out a few exemplary women in the field but it can be a bit of a stretch to find them.

I’ve been thinking about this off and on for quite awhile and I have a couple of thoughts on why this could be:

1. Men just outnumber women in web design – this is probably partly true, but I don’t quite buy it as a reason for this problem.
2. Women have less spare time than men – creating a name for yourself through blogging and writing articles and such requires spare time. Spare time that women have less of. Why? Because we need to care for our families, do the housework, exercise, and take some time for ourselves. Societal expectations are higher in the non-professional sphere. Sometimes you’ll hear that women need to work harder than men to do as well in the workplace. I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but it could apply here. In her post on this topic, Rachel Andrew mentioned that women can’t always leave their children for a few days to go to a conference. Unfortunately, lack of time probably applies to a lot of people, not just women!
3. Women have less confidence in themselves – making a name for yourself also requires some confidence in your own abilities. You need to believe that you have something worthwhile to contribute. Tantek says to  “stop waiting for a speaking invitation handout.” For a long time I resisted the idea of having a blog because I didn’t think I had anything worthwhile to say. One of Rachel’s commenters mentioned that she’s shy about attending a conference on her own, which is something I can definitely relate to.

Many others have posted their own thoughts on this topic. Some believe that the whole issue is irrelevant, while others continue to stress the importance of encouraging diversity. Dave Shea mentioned that with Web Directions North they intentionally invited diverse group of speakers and saw that reflected in their audience. Unfortunately I don’t have time to read all the great posts on this topic

Disclaimer: All generalizations in this post are simply that: generalizations. They are not meant to apply to everyone!

Edit: BlogHer has a good summary of the debate on this topic.

So I went to sign up for a hotmail account, thinking it would be a relatively simple procedure. Was I ever wrong about that!

The sign-up process

Disclaimer: When I attempted to go through this registration this morning, I got a completely different registration form than the one that currently appears (as of Tuesday evening). I think it’s possible they were changing it when I was getting the error messages I described below. Either that or I just got a different form because I was using Opera on Windoze. Most of these problems apply to the new form as well

The new form no longer requires reloading to validate, but also no longer indicates which fields are required. The new form adds the full birth date (instead of just birth year), and your time zone.

The Hotmail (now branded “Windows Live Mail”) sign up process is a whopping 5 pages long. First you decide if you want to pay for additional services (yeah right). Then you get to the sign up page. Since there are so many millions of people on hotmail, you’d think they would have a way to suggest a username that hasn’t been taken. Nope, sorry. Keep guessing till you find one that works. Of course, this feedback doesn’t happen until you submit the whole form.

This lengthy form includes your usual username, password, and password recovery sections, followed by a section for your full name, gender, birth year, and country/province/postal code. Why does Microsoft need to know that to give me an email address? All of the fields in the address section are required, including your birth year. What happens if you try to put in a fake address? That’s right, validation errors on submit. It even checks to make sure your postal code matches your province. The secret here, of course, is to pick some random smaller country that they won’t have validation information for.

No fake answers!

But there’s a catch – when I select Angola as my country and submit, the validation page comes up with the fields reset to Canada. And, of course, each time this happens you have to fill out the password field again. Microsoft also insists on validating the birth year. I could not be born in 4444, or 1589. Sometimes it just says “Please verify that you have entered the correct information”. Gee, that’s helpful. Oops, now I get a “We are working to fix a temporary problem with our sign-up service.” error. What??? Probably because I kept having to resubmit the form a million times to get the information right

So, Microsoft has gone to extraordinary lengths to try to force you to give them your actual personal information. In the fine print next to the personal information section it says “This information helps us personalize your Windows Live experience.” Okkaaayyyy. What if I don’t want my experience to be “personalized”? What if I want to protect my personal information? What if I don’t want you spying on me you bastards?

Now this section says “Your location information can be used to help reset a forgotten password.” Isn’t that interesting. They already had a password helper question. Smells like bullshit to me.

Further thoughts: It is a bit paranoid to be fussy about entering my postal code, but it is in combination with my full name. And I checked – they do include this information for birth dates after 1991 (without any extra alerts or instructions … unless maybe they do that in IE, I don’t know). Children are often less discerning about these things too. They know your full name, roughly where you live, your birth date, and whatever you enter into your emails. What could they do insteaed? Just ask you what name you want displayed with your emails. Doesn’t have to be your real name, doesn’t have to be a full name, and it can be anonymous.

The user experience

Why in the world do people go through this! It’s unbelievable. And yet, most of the emails we see from students here are hotmail addresses. It is interesting that the example under Birth Year is 1999!

There is no example under birth year on the new form. It is interesting that they have drop-downs for month and day but not year, especially since they are insisting that I enter a valid one.

Once I finally got the form right (half an hour later), I saw a screen asking me to activate my account. Of course I click “activate” without reading what’s on the screen. This will come back to haunt me later. Then there is the obligatory Terms of Service and one of those annoying how many newsletters can you get me to sign up for screens.

The terms of service is now included in the registration form, not on a separate page. The registration process is now 4 pages instead of 5.

Follow up – what happens next?

I actually did sign up for an account back before Christmas to test some HTML emails. Today I had to test some new ones, so I attempted to log in to my hotmail account. This is what happened:

Oh, right! That’s the activate account screen I agreed to when I first signed up. Turns out that you can’t use hotmail if you’re just going to use it once in awhile. No, they want to make you sign in every 30 days – sooner if you’ve just got a new account.

I’m not sure if this screen exists anymore. Now the third screen in the process just tells you that the address is ready to use at any time. Of course, I have used my account recently so I can’t go back and check again.

Microsoft is just so out of touch

Now, I imagine they might have good reasons for some of these things. Some of these measures may help prevent people from abusing their services. However these are very severe restrictions on the user experience. This isn’t what the web is about anymore. It’s not about forcing users to do things your way, and preventing them from having any control or freedom, or forcing them to give you their personal information. It’s about the total opposite – empowering users. The reason why some of the so-called “web 2.0″ companies (and google) have done so well is that they make things seamless. It’s easy and elegant, and it makes things easier for people.

On the other hand….

I can sort of see how things like this happen. I know we’ve put in a number of restrictions in the forums to stop spammers. Unfortunately, they have put some small restrictions on regular members. However, we do stop short at anything that would really hurt the user experience. We do our best to find solutions to the spam problems without annoying everyone. There’s definitely a balance to be found there

Testing HTML emails

Yes, I know there is a service that can test your emails and show how they would display in different email clients. I think we will be looking into that when we redesign the newsletter in the spring. For now, the HTML we are using is very basic so I didn’t feel it would be worth it to pay for a service to test them.

An apology: I do apologize for all the mistakes in this email. I am still not sure what happened with that form – if they changed right when I posted this or if I was just fed something different because I’m on Opera. I hope you will all continue to read my posts here, despite the mistakes

I’ll give you a sec to skim through that.

Didn’t I see some of those in my spam folder the other day? “Cheap Hosting Provider”, “Wholesale Childrens Clothing”, “Dubai Furnished Apartments”, “Online Gambling Guide”??? Many of the links appear to be for legit but it’s these spammy ones that caught my attention. The W3C is effectively selling PR 9 linkbacks from a highly respected site for $1000 apeice.

Just disgusting. And sad. You’d think that google would recognize that as a spam page with all those shady links on it. Maybe it does, I don’t know.

(This was pointed out to me by this post about digg spamming which really has nothing else to do with this post)

I have been subscribed to the digg design and tech news feeds for a couple of months now. I liked how the design section featured all types of design. It’s interesting to see what’s being done with cars, interiors, and industrial design. I think all design fields could learn a lot from each other.

I think the people who run some of these social networking sites have suffered from lack of experience with online communities. They believe that the users will moderate the system for them, but that isn’t always working. And it’s working less and less as more website owners figure out that social bookmarking sites might help them get more traffic. I think digg is showing the effects of that now. The bad content is outweighing the good stuff and people can’t be bothered to sort through it all anymore. I used to go through the design upcoming section and ocassionally I’d find some good stuff in there. But mostly I’d be digging down spam. And now there’s much more spam than good stuff. The design section is now littered with bad SEO advice, desktop wallpapers, and cheap templates.

What do these sites need to learn? The old adage “give them an inch and they’ll take a mile” applies to online communities. Specifically, if you let people post links to their own sites, they will. And they will do it a lot. And they will have no qualms about what type of content they post, where they post it, or whether it’s appropriate for the site. I have seen some social bookmarking sites littered with porn spam links. How good is that for users? Are you really going to revisit a site that comes up with that crap? Or what about the stuff that’s not even in English? It might be good content and all, but it’s completely useless when you don’t speak the language.

Forum owners have been dealing with this for years. We’ve come up with all sorts of measures to prevent people from spamming. At TWF we have specific permissions set for our Market Place area. You can’t advertise if you don’t have enough posts. At Sitepoint they make people pay for listings in certain areas. At Digital Point you can’t post a link at all until you have a certain number of posts. Webmaster World has an even more restrictive policy on linking: no promotional links to your own site allowed, including signatures. These things do make things more difficult for honest users, but forum owners find they are necessary to control spam. Why? Becuase we’ve learned that if you don’t have controls the spammers will do everything they can to take advantage of you and it could turn users away from your site for good.

In reality, social bookmarking sites only work if you make a lot of friends and share content amongst yourselves. Great, if you can find people to be friends with. The system doesn’t make it easy for you to do this. Very little information is available in the profiles. Tagging is limited. You can’t filter friends’ listings to see only the stuff you’re interested in. You can’t even contact anyone. On digg, you’re going to have a hard time finding people who aren’t into video games, Linux, and liberal US politics.

I think the ideal case could be a system that is based on friendships to start with. You join a network of people interested in the same topics. The system makes it easy for anyone to make friends. You share links. There is some mechanism to allow meaningful communication between members, and more detailed profiles so people can actually get to know each other instead of intereacting with tiny avatars and meaningless screennames. Ma.gn.olia sort of has this going but there aren’t enough people there to make it useful and there is no real concept of counts on bookmarks. Del.icio.us is an improvement over digg with all the tagging, but there is no way to find out more about people or communicate with them in any way. Both are more oriented towards bookmarks than news.

Anyway, I think I’m going to turn off my digg feeds. It’s time to move on.

Update: I was talking to Liam about this and he said that it’s really just been reduced to the lowest common denominator. Sensational, popular topics that appeal to the largest portion of the audience with little complex thought involved. You hate Microsoft? Check, that’s a digg. Enough for them! I think the spam problem has had something to do with this because it has driven away intelligent people who would digg up quality content.

We did have a big discussion about this issue last year. If you take a look at that thread (and the websites of some of the posters) some of the problems become evident. Even the people who are deploring the lack professional standards don’t seem to have any themselves.

In the comments after Jeff’s post he used a haircut analogy, which is something I often bring up myself when discussing this issue. I could give you a haircut right now, but do you really want me to? Probably not. Your hair would be shorter but would certainly look like crap. So why is it okay for someone who just picked up Dreamweaver to start selling web design? And why is it that once people learn how to make a decent site they decide it’s okay to stop learning? Would it be okay with you if your doctor wasn’t reading up on scientific research and incorporating it into his/her practice? I didn’t think so. This isn’t a life threatening problem by any means but it does affect the quality of product.

Speaking of quality, why is it that people can easily spot a bad haircut when they see one but can’t spot bad web design? Even some of these so-called “designers” can’t see it. Why is that? Do some of us just have overly sensitive eyesight or what? It’s bizarre – you look at some of those sites and wonder who in their right mind thought that was a good idea. If someone was selling bad haircuts they wouldn’t be in business for very long. And I’d bet their disappointed client would be heading to another hair stylist ASAP.

I do agree that it is necessary and beneficial to have different levels of price/quality in the industry. But the products that some of these people are selling is just way below what a low quality/cheap site should be. Ever check out those freelancer sites? Take a look at some of the portolios posted some time, it’s good for a laugh …. or cry! As another example, this is one of the most successful web design companies in the medium sized city where I live. Go on, disable tables, you know you want to! (Update: that company has posted an updated design since this post was written)

There have been a number of strategies proposed to deal with this problem by others in the industry. As Jeff mentioned, Mark Boulton had a post last week about a professional organization for web designers. I like the idea of that but agree that the logistics of it might be too much to overcome. You’d have to have a lot of powerful people in the industry coming together to make something like that happen. Earlier last year some others had a big discussion about “non-professionals” using tabled designs and all that. I found that this had the opposite effect on the people it was meant to target. They just got more set in their ways.

So what would be a good strategy? I think we first need to work on educating people about what good web design is. We also need to work on educating beginning webmasters about what it takes to be a professional.

Liam says: “Some fucking middle manager came up with that, didn’t they?”

Just when we thought that everyone was starting to figure out that the whole thing is a bunch of bullshit, the offline marketing twats get ahold of it! Great. How much more of this will we have to put up with?

A brief history of Web 2.0 revelation:

• September 19, 2005: Web 2.0 is crap at Bedlam 2.0. Check out the title on the little question mark next to the logo.
• December 9, 2005: Liam & other TWF’ers write that “Web 2.0 doesn’t exist!
• December 19, 2005: Why Web 2.0 has jumped the shark from Read/Write Web
• January 16, 2006: barely comprehensible Zeldman rant about Web 3.0
• August 22, 2006: Berners-Lee disses 2.0, again at Read/Write web
• Just for fun: Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator (note that it’s in beta, and includes a shiny reflection! Oooooohhhhh)

Any other web 2.0 bullshit links?