Stern levels critical!

The Stern Ultimatum

Most forums would ban him as a spambot. Not halflife2.net! Its safer here!

(can we still say that?)

Oh, please... I've seen forums with such poor management that spambots have free reign. It's as if there are no moderators present at all.

One of the forums I frequent is so inactive that about half of the posts are spam bots (or, more accurately, people getting paid some pittance to post the spam). Their posts are generally just on-topic enough that nobody bothers to get rid of them, and I'm not sure Google can even see the spam in their signatures anyway.

If we didn't have moderators, this place would be called shoetime.net

I was looking at a abandoned forum a while back.

Last real post was several years ago, and there were hundreds of new post since then purely by spam bots

Imagine sentient spam bots, and the embarrassment that they are only advertising to each other.

it was actually very bizarre and creepy.

out of the many sub sections, some had activity dating back to less years than others, some even dating mere months.

then the single active sub section being the spam filled general section standing out amongst an abandoned forums.

if I were to compare it to anything it would be like walking into an abandoned building that is being overtaken by the wilderness, yet still displaying signs of human activity in the slightly more recent trash and grafiti littering the place

Ah, but they're not looking for people to see the links; they're looking to improve their pagerank with Google. Most forums, though, are configured so that search engine spiders can't see links on the forum, which I think Valvetime does.

Edit: Incidentally, I've gotten 9 hits from this site (7 from half-life2.net and 2 from valvetime.net) on the word generator script I made since I added a link in my signature months ago. Not the most effective way to get traffic.

Yeah, but you rank #1 for the search term "I made a thing that makes words". Valuable.




One of the 10 letter words I got on there:

xentoother

I dont know if you people have noticed but this community is in it's death throes. new threads are far in between. as hl2.netter once said at the end days of this forum it'll just be me posting to my own threads. we are almost there

Is that really so? I had the impression that with fewer posts, the posters who did stick around here would coalesce into a kind of small community. I don't know if it's that much of a bad thing that there are fewer topics being made. What I do see is a lot of views on each and every one of the topics being started, which would seem to indicate that this place isn't as dead as it seems.

Yes Stern, it's dying, quick jump off the ship before it's too late! We'll be right behind you!

We've been in our death throes for awhile now apparently. If you do a search you'd find people saying as much, going back three or four years at least. We might as well consider it our normal state of being now.

it has become a lot worse in the last few months. there are days where there are no new posts in many of the subsections. I blame the ugly dude with the bowl haircut

Even during our busier years it was still 50% you on the front page.

People say that every time too.

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