I'm not racist (I have friends of almost all races) but I have this new community site that accepts user content, and these Indians, Chinese, etc. that can barely speak English are just royally polluting the site. I know it's not exactly PC but should I just block people from India, China, Singapore, Thailand, etc. from even accessing the site? Or let them access the site but if they try to post a comment just throw up a fake internal server error or something? I'm sure lots of big community sites do this kind of thing and it just doesn't get talked about much. Any of you run big community sites? What do you do? I already have moderators that have to read and approve every single comment, and it seems like they are spending half their time dealing with barely readable comments from non-native English speaking users.
New community site - should I just ban all Indians etc?
- Thread starter dsiomtw
- Start date
If they're doing nothing positive on your site and bringing in no revenue, why would you keep them?
If nothing else there's a lot of security nastiness coming out of there(china especially) and you'll probably save yourself some headaches.
But if you don't want to ban, force email verification+captcha+an extra obnoxious feature or two on certain countries. Cuts down on the amount of crap without the authoritarian-style banning of the country.
If nothing else there's a lot of security nastiness coming out of there(china especially) and you'll probably save yourself some headaches.
But if you don't want to ban, force email verification+captcha+an extra obnoxious feature or two on certain countries. Cuts down on the amount of crap without the authoritarian-style banning of the country.
Thanks for the replies. We already do email verification and reCaptcha for all sign-ups.
These "undesirables" could end up generating revenue by clicking on ads, etc. which is why I thought I might let them browse the site, but just not allow them to post content. Obviously I can't come out say "Sorry you are not allowed to post because you're in India" so that's where the idea of throwing up a fake internal server or other bogus error came from. I would probably also allow them to post in some of the forums, just not post any content on the main site.
These "undesirables" could end up generating revenue by clicking on ads, etc. which is why I thought I might let them browse the site, but just not allow them to post content. Obviously I can't come out say "Sorry you are not allowed to post because you're in India" so that's where the idea of throwing up a fake internal server or other bogus error came from. I would probably also allow them to post in some of the forums, just not post any content on the main site.
Don't blanket ban
I think a blanket ban on all visitors from certain countries is probably not a great idea, for a number of reasons. Not least because some genuinely helpful users on many forums, including WF, come from India and other Asian nations.
How about banning on an individual basis? You could stipulate in the TOS that all posts have to be useful and in legible English, or they get deleted and the poster gets banned. It gives you and your mods a bit more work, but it couldn't possibly take up more than ten minutes of your time a day.
I think a blanket ban on all visitors from certain countries is probably not a great idea, for a number of reasons. Not least because some genuinely helpful users on many forums, including WF, come from India and other Asian nations.
How about banning on an individual basis? You could stipulate in the TOS that all posts have to be useful and in legible English, or they get deleted and the poster gets banned. It gives you and your mods a bit more work, but it couldn't possibly take up more than ten minutes of your time a day.
NickRac
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I agree with you, and will admit I'm a bit torn.
While we get a lot of good users from those countries, we get an INSANE amount of crap.
Including lately a lot of identity theft spam(credit card numbers) and straight up scams (if you've seen a thread about CHEEAP NOKIA IPHONE before we killed it, that was one). So it's a liability as well as an annoyance.
So it's one of those things where it creates a huge level of nastiness on the board. If I ran one, I'd probably force most of Asia and Africa to manually e-mail me for approval.
It's not a question of the nationality, it's a question of how well they police/handle their IPs.
You could never get away with the sketchier stuff on a US IP. So people don't really try.
Screw PC.
I ban the fuck out of Nigerians on a few of my sites, fuckers are nuthin but scamsters. Much better to protect the honest users as much as possible. You don't want your site known as a wasteland, a free for all.
I lived in India for over a year, they are some great people, but I wouldn't sacrifice an otherwise good site if they were fucking it up. Depends what your trying to do, but if your out to make money, then make money. It's your show, you set the rules. Screw PC.
Ad revenue is generally less from Asian visitors, and your advertisers might not be too pleased to be receiving that kind of traffic.
I ban the fuck out of Nigerians on a few of my sites, fuckers are nuthin but scamsters. Much better to protect the honest users as much as possible. You don't want your site known as a wasteland, a free for all.
I lived in India for over a year, they are some great people, but I wouldn't sacrifice an otherwise good site if they were fucking it up. Depends what your trying to do, but if your out to make money, then make money. It's your show, you set the rules. Screw PC.
Ad revenue is generally less from Asian visitors, and your advertisers might not be too pleased to be receiving that kind of traffic.
Unfortunately that is just not the case. Yes there are some extremely intelligent and well educated Indians, and Chinese, and the same can be said for any other race or country. But the truth of the matter is that least on the Internet, the ratio of crap to ratio of good that comes from India is about 90/10. No offense to anyone but at the most 10% of them can write proper English, and my site relies on professional and well written content. If I have to lose the 10% to weed out the 90% then that's what I gotta do. 10 mins a day to weed out and cancel individual posts, comments, users, etc.? I wish. This is a busy site I'm talking about with 1,000s of user-submitted comments/posts a day, and it's only a week old.
I've blocked India. I'm seriously thinking of blocking all but 10-15 countries where the majority of the population is English speaking.
This is pretty much why. I'm tempted to quote the line from Pulp Fiction, but I don't want to be rude.
whatever is best for your community man. That is what you should do. A smaller more active and useful forum will be better than a bigger, run wild, crash and burn site.
It's bad practice and here's why. There are a finite number of smart people on the internet, and an even smaller number that want to join your community. The top 1% of users really determine the quality of the community. If you lose 1 one intelligent person ready to make a large contribution to your forum by banning Indian IPs you have hurt your forum immensely. Ban people on a case by case for terrible English/stupidity. Sure it takes a little more time, but it will be worth it.
why thailand,. the only people in thailand that know how to use the internet and speak english are there for the entertainment and not local. all thais do on the internet is play ranganarok all day and look at cell phone porn videos of teenage girls getting banged.
but really, on one of my sites, when we get a problematic user, we dont ban them, cause they just come back again on a proxy or whatever, but we sandbox them so they THINK they are being heard, but are completely invisible to the rest .
that or you can set a script so whenever they click anywhere on your site that they are taken to a random page. so they think your site is just really stupid and go away
with internet rats, brute force never works, you need to trick em.
so if you were going to do country wide bans, I definitively wont put up a message that says "your country is banned"
just set something to make the site not function properly for certain IP ranges. A good programmer should know what to do and have some fun with it.
but really, on one of my sites, when we get a problematic user, we dont ban them, cause they just come back again on a proxy or whatever, but we sandbox them so they THINK they are being heard, but are completely invisible to the rest .
that or you can set a script so whenever they click anywhere on your site that they are taken to a random page. so they think your site is just really stupid and go away
with internet rats, brute force never works, you need to trick em.
so if you were going to do country wide bans, I definitively wont put up a message that says "your country is banned"
just set something to make the site not function properly for certain IP ranges. A good programmer should know what to do and have some fun with it.
Hello friend,
What quote? I love movies Hollywood ... Pulp Fiction good movie.
You mean quote of Samuel jackson when say passage of Bible?
I no be offend. I tolerant other religion include Christian.
Good luck bro
Yes Nigerians are absolutely the worst. They will pester your community pretending to be a hot lonely chick and its pathetic to watch your users fall for it. Indian I have never had a problem with, but I did ban Vietnam. I do allow China and have not had a major problem yet and would not want to ban such a large country but i would if i had too.
But defintely ban the fuck out of Nigeria. That ones a no brainer. I ban all of subsarharan Africa at the server level for that matter.
Ok you asked for it ...
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7jhb8_UPfw"]YouTube - English Motherfucker[/ame]