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As SEO Chat's Forum continues to grow, we continue to have problems with people spamming the forum in order to increase their link popularity. SEO Chat, like many other forums, allow signature links. However, SEO Chat has a fairly attractive PageRank value, which tends to attract link seekers. A forum for SEOs by SEOs with high PR is not always a good match. Since SEO Chat's PageRank rose, link enthusiasts have come by and posted hundreds of "Thank you, great post" with links to their sites. Deleting, pruning and banning those members takes too much time. So we decided to institute some policy.
First policy was not to allow members with less then 100 posts to show their signature file. After that was set into play, we saw two things. (1) Manual signature links embedded within the body of a post. (2) People posting a hundred times in one day in order to reach the 100 post requirement. If those 100 posts were of value, no one would care but of course they were not.
So we added a second policy. Why not name it, the SEO Chat Sandbox. We require 100 posts PLUS a member has to be on board for 90 days. The 90 days are symbolic of the average time it takes for a site that has been sandboxed by Google to come out of the sandbox. I hope this works.
