Eliminating Anonymous Members

[Jim Messenger]

A couple days ago we announced some changes to the forum titled Reducing Noise, Combating Spam and Conditional Signatures.

We also mentioned that we were considering prohibiting anonymous registrations for the forum.

We'd love to hear your comments. Please visit the above post and give us your feedback.

[Jim Messenger]

After a bit more deliberation we decided to finalize our plans to eliminate membership to anonymous users.

We believe that a vetting process that requires email verification and a moderator's review of the members profile before they are confirmed will totally eliminate spam and increase the overall quality of posts.

Visit your user control panel and click edit profile to see the new required fields. As always, we look forward to your feedback.

Jim

[Andrea Messenger]

I think this is a great addition. While we understand this will limit the quantity of members, it will most certainly increase the quality of posts. And decrease spam (in fact, I'm not sure there's any possibility of spam getting in now).

We also believe this will increase interaction among members. Everyone will know that each member went through a vetting process just to get here. Those that want to make new posts or respond to questions can feel comfortable that they are interacting with someone else in the real estate industry.

We don't mind having a reputation that only the elite in the real estate field belong to the FamousAgents.com forum. In fact, we prefer it.

And when agents are looking for referral partners, it won't be a tough decision to go to a FamousAgents.com member first.

[Jim Messenger]

Update:

On July 1st, 2007 we will prune the membership database to include only the members that have updated the required fields on their profile page. If you have not already done so, please update your profile ASAP.

Once the database has been pruned, we will be implementing some changes to the way our Members list is displayed on the site. This improved list will also be indexable by the search engines. Hint, Hint...

We received a few emails asking whether we were concerned that these new vetting procedures would affect the size of our membership. The answer is NO. We would rather have a high quality forum than a large one.

To update your profile, login and then click on the User CP tab at the top of the forums.

Thanks for your contributions,

Jim & Andrea Messenger, Founders

[Gary Schmitz]

Hey Jim,
I updated my profile earlier and just received an email. Is my profile good or do I have to do more?

[Yolanda Hoversten]

Hello! I'm not anonymous nor a prune, so don't delete me. Thanks for the reminder. I do have a question---what's a trackback? Have a great evening!

[Jim Messenger]

Originally Posted by Gary Schmitz Hey Jim, I updated my profile earlier and just received an email. Is my profile good or do I have to do more?

Hi Gary,

Your profile looks great. Nice to see you here.

Jim

[Jim Messenger]

Originally Posted by Yolanda Hoversten Hello! I'm not anonymous nor a prune, so don't delete me. Thanks for the reminder. I do have a question---what's a trackback? Have a great evening!

Hello Yolanda,

Your first sentence made me laugh. We look forward to you contributions to the forum.

A Trackback is a notification to a Web author when another web page contains links to their documents.

Jim

[naplesrealestate]

Hi Jim,

I think my profile has been completed - you might want to check it out if you need a good laugh.

[Jim Messenger]

Update: As of today all anonymous members have been deleted.

For those of you who are in to the numbers, we reduced the number of members from 497 to 149. Out of the Current 149 active members, 137 qualify to be on the members list.

Note: Earlier this year we began deleting all of the members who signed up with bad email addresses. Since then and prior to today we have deleted more than 1000 registrations.

I believe that FamousAgents.com now has the only "fully vetted" public real estate forum in existence.

Thanks for all of your contributions,

Jim Messenger