My favorite forums: Part 1

By | June 3, 2007

I think I ought to write a post on my favorite online forums and why I like them. I would not have gotten as far as I have come today, if it weren’t for the forums that give so much in terms of value to anyone who pays a visit (and joins them). Its more like a review, and although I only have a few favorites, I am pretty much familiar with them, having spent many hours there in the past.

Digital Point Forum

digital-point-forum.jpgFirst on the list would be without a doubt, Digital Point Forum. Often referred to as DP forum for short. This is the highest Alexa ranked webmaster forum in the world and with good reason. Guys like Shoemoney and many others first learned their trade on this forum. So did I.

I’ve found it to be a great place to get to know other fellow webmasters and there are many threads that you can learn a deal from. Also, it’s probably the most updated forum when it comes to Web news of just about any kind.

Digital Point Forum was one of the first forums to implement Adsense revenue sharing. This means you can give them your Adsense publisher ID and it will display in the Adsense Ads for threads you start or participate in. The earnings are as far as I know, minimal.

The most busy part of Digital Point forum has to be the Marketplace. Indeed, you could find almost any type of deal there is over there. The biggest puller is the sites-for-sale section. If you can find your way through flipping and selling websites, (some people do that for a living), then this is a good place to learn the basics.

The downsides to Digital Point Forum are the excessive one liner posts that contribute next to no value to the forum. Although I understand it is usually done to increase post count, I think the forum would be a better place with less of those one liners.

A thing to be careful is the fact that scams do occur in the DP Marketplace. True, many of the deals are honest deals, but I’ve noticed at the same time, lots of fake stuff being sold. A thing to watch out is fake traffic being pumped to a domain or website for the purpose of ramping up their prices. Many newbies could get suckered without knowing it. Best thing to do, is to research first before reaching for your wallet.

I’ve seen many people who had good reputations on Digital Point getting banned for probably dubious conduct. On the other hand, some people who are otherwise banned on many other forums, are doing well at Digital Point!

Digital Point offers some really good tools for free. The one I’ve always used is their keyword suggestion tool. Although it doesn’t work well these days due to the frequent updates to Overture and Wordtracker, it is still quite reliable to give a rough picture of a certain keyword. These days, I use Aaron Wall’s SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool.

In order to post something on the Digital Point Marketplace, you need to be a member for 2 weeks and have 25 posts. Also, you shouldn’t accumulate infractions until your reputation is red.

A system that DP uses is the infraction system, which penalizes members with a negative point score if they infringe on the rules. Administrators are allowed to issue “red reputation points” if they feel you have done something wrong. Although its open to debate if this is a good system or not (since other forums don’t have this), I think overall does keep the system clear of spam, abusive posts and other negative behaviour.

If I were to rate Digital Point Forum on a scale of 1 to 10, I would have to give it a 9.

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