Another wild week in the online drama that is Namepros. The constant pro Epik members battling anti Epik members continues to drag on.
From the poll I have run the last 3 years on best or favorite registrar, with some saying employees should not be allowed to vote. That gets complicated because Epik has several members with an Epik employee badge, yes Namepros mods/management has posted in the past many registrars have a fair number of employees but these members don’t really talk about or represent their company on Namepros.
So you would not know who is an employee for every company. GoDaddy we know @Joe Styler and @Paul Nicks but as someone told me last year, you can bet there are a lot more GoDaddy employees on Namepros.
Whether the poll means much or not is a personal choice. BusinessInsider picked up the press release NameSilo put out last year after winning.
There have been members closing accounts, (they ususally come back) different definitions of self promotion, spam, defending oneself, etc…
Talk about a close community. Namepros has never been a close community. There are clusters of close cliques, but not the whole community.
There are people who contribute, people who only take, people who spam, people who only sell. Oh and the people who are not domainers, reporting your semi TM infracted domain to the legal counsel of corporations, those who are reporting you to ICANN for incomplete whois information. No again, we are not all on the same side.
Those that believe the forum is there’s and that new interlopers don’t belong.
Back in the summer when people were battling a few people asked me about opening a new forum, I had no interest.
At the beginning of the year, I did suggest to Rob Monster that he open his own forum at Epik.
Over the weekend I have heard more calls for a new forum, I had people who I guess did not pay attention to the drama asking for a recap at Midnight on a Saturday night.
There are so many threads that it’s hard to keep up, people who think they are helping are not helping.
If I believe you are spamming, I should report you, if I tell you here you are again, can’t believe you, etc… First off it helps the spammer, secondly it takes the thread way off topic, I watched the mods have to delete over 100 posts in 3 threads yesterday.
So all that extra help that some think they are doing is not helping. It just gets each side to say I am not giving in.
The Epik army is going to be there to defend Rob. It’s not going to stop on it’s own.
Namepros needs more mods, a forum that big cannot have hours or even a half hour with no mod online.
Now one route you might want to go instead of a forum but to have your own private group with a lot of features.
Create a second Twitter handle, and make it private, and only other members of your group can follow and interact with one another.
If I were to do it, it would be TLDiRaymond and if I wanted Brad Mugford to be apart, I would tell him to get the handle TLDiBrad, when he went to follow me, I would accept because I would know it’s him by the handle.
Regular Twitter is also doing just fine, many people have told me they stopped posting at Namepros over the summer and find Twitter much more engaging.
Many people who are on Twitter are also not participants at Namepros, either in any capacity, or they only show up when they need to defend themselves against something said wrong about them.
Rick Schwartz, Mike Mann, Mike Berkens, Andrew Rosener, Jamie Zoch, Shane Cultra, Logan Flatt, Joshua Schoenn, Mike Sullivan, Bill Sweetman and a whole host of others are on Twitter and not on Namepros in any real capacity. So there is a lot of stuff going on in other places than just Namepros.
DomainBoardroom.com might be a place for those who want to avoid the noise and participate in a smaller, private forum. You are not guaranteed to get in, but if you know a member and they can vouch you are a good human, you will probably get in.
Namepros needs a couple new rules on how people deal with disagreements. They need more mods as when the mods log on there is just a wave of reports that no one can be looking forward to, they are being overworked because of nonsense.
Hope those closing accounts over stuff like this get to a psychiatrist, a lot more than domain forums going on there.
I’m one of the people who closed their account. I did it for own peace of mind, nothing else.
I left namepros end of January, quite honestly I have better things to do with my time. Surprisingly I have sold a lot more domains since I am actively selling now instead of talking about selling.
That said there are a lot of members asking me to open a dedicated .ca forum so watch for dn.ca opening in the near future.
Cool let me know when DN.ca opens and I will do an interview. Best of luck.
Open just a brand new domain forum, it’s needed. As long as you don’t let 1 company buy it up.
The point about moderator coverage is what I would focus attentions on.
I have reported posts that sit for hours, no mods moved it or deleted it.
Something needs to be done, some advertisers spending big money there I am told.
Twitter is ok if you can avoid people like Morgan linton, impressed with a country that caused this virus to take place by eating things like bats. Real class act, I don’t think I ever disliked someone I never met more than linton.
“DomainBoardroom.com might be a place for those who want to avoid the noise and participate in a smaller, private forum.”
Do you know if that is an active forum? Do you know if Rob is there?
I went back to DNForum but that one looks tainted now as well.
Does anybody know of any good or up and coming domain forums? Some people are looking for a new place.
I follow only the practical areas – news, sales reports, registration reports, promos, registrars and marketplaces discussions, there is no drama at all, everything is as usual.
I don’t understand this whole representatives thing by Epik though. A few days ago I received an email from the “regional manager in Russia and Ukraine”. I am not sure why would I need a regional manager. I know Rob Monster himself sells domains too, so it can’t be helped he as a domainer can utilize a vast amount of his insider knowledge. But Rob Monster is a public figure, he is transparent and trustworthy. Yet all these new Epik people are domainers as well. Just how much of the Epik customers data do they have access to? Does the “regional manager” know about my domains and transactions? Or do all of them know? I wouldn’t like them to. I would like to be confident that only the very limited amount of inhouse staff, bound by proper contracts and caring about their reputation, would have access to my data, no one else. And the support staff to only know about those domains/transactions where their assistance was requested.
another forum won’t cure it
staying away won’t cure it
not taking it so seriously could eventually cure it
These are a few things that I had suggested over at NamePros:
1- Make some of the trustworthy and fair minded members into Deputy Moderators to help with monitoring the forum.
2- Give a special paid section to each Registrar so that all their threads are found in one place and within their paid section allow them to discuss, promote, and advertise their services.
3- Give a civility rating to members based on how they conduct themselves on the forum and give more weight to “Dislikes” given by members with high ratings.
4- Add a “Disagree” button that people can use when they don’t agree with a certain comment or idea, but that they don’t want to “Dislike” another member for it.
IMO
Ojohn,
1. We’re working on something very similar to this.
2. We’ve discussed why we don’t think this would help.
3. Coming soon.
4. Coming very soon. 🙂
“At the beginning of the year, I did suggest to Rob Monster that he open his own forum at Epik.”
That would clean up Namepros a lot, but he probably won’t do that because he would rather keep his “mini” army on Namepros.
The one difference discussing topics on private blogs is the topic won’t be deleted or heavily moderated. It’s actually quite refreshing to see Raymond take on a topic like this, it’s much needed.
My personal opinion on all of this is that forums like namepros and dnforum, and even DomainBoardroom.com are all there for profit. Say as you will in the end the forums exist not because they care about domainers or domaining, the underlying purpose is to make money.
I ran a large forum in the past and I simply cannot understand all these so called costs. Use a program like phpbb or simple machines and expand to a dedicated server when needed. There is no need for member levels asking for yearly fees.
Run a community for the community, by the community. Make it NOT for profit and ask for an occasional voluntary donation to cover server costs.
All the WE HAVE CUSTOM SOFTWARE and need this because we have traffic is all a load off bullcrap, most new forum software and especially XenForo can handle any traffic necessary straight out of the box. Simply ask for a few donations to cover the XenForo and dedicated server costs and you’re good to go.
In my opinion a new forum would be a great solution, as long as it’s not for profit and community owned.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, a successful community owned not for profit model would be the best solution.
MapleDots,
Respectfully, you are very naive about how much money NamePros invests into the community and how much it actually costs (and cost in the past) to make NamePros what it is today.
The *optional* paid subscriptions on NamePros are largely for maintenance and security purposes: they allow members to increase their capabilities and access on the forums because scammers/spammers are unlikely to pay for an upgrade compared to a person with good intentions. Beyond that, they’re a nice way to show gratitude for all that NamePros offers for free: https://www.namepros.com/threads/namepros-services-and-resources.856672/
Your technological perspective in your comment is inaccurate, but if you’re interested in being educated on it, please email our CTO.
Lastly, there will likely never be a more giving and selfless domain forum than the current NamePros, but maybe only those who carefully study it will realize that.
Lol look at the children, I see some goof Dncafe just started a poll that rips off your poll Raymond.
Does this person know not all employees are listed as employees on Namepros.
Do these people have lives? if namepros is the center of your life you really need to find some new hobbies, maybe physical fitness, maybe see a shrink.
These little oh so and so is leaving, who cares?
Let’s keep it 100, grilled, brandsinternational, frank germany are nobodies in this industry, like most of namepros membership.
The real business is done by the mediaoptions, the pollocks – the cygers, the manns, the ricks.
Namepros is where you go to see what those who think they are real business people are doing.
We hear your feedback, and we’re actively working on improvements.
You’re right that NamePros could benefit from more moderators. While the management team was preparing to add more moderators, they created tools to help find members who could become helpful moderators. During that process, they realized that they could use similar technology to automatically empower the community to moderate itself, for the most part. As a bonus, this would scale well as the community grows. It’d also be much faster than any HR department and more representative of what’s best for the domain community.
The thing we are excited about is:
Working on ways to turn over more control to the community and make members more accountable for their actions, where accountability is heavily influenced by community members’ opinions.
This will not be something simple such as total likes; it will be based on almost every piece of historical information attached to accounts and difficult to abuse.
We want to empower the community with the majority of control over forum matters. There will be different levels to that, and the most sincere members who have the best interest of NamePros at heart will be in control of what happens. The decisions will become mostly community based and your peers who love NamePros the most will decide what happens.
The goal is to allow those who care the most about NamePros (as indicated by significant helpful contribution and a mostly constructive history) to decide what is best for the community.
We have high hopes for it.
i don’t like the Twitter idea. yea, some big personalities prefer that form of megaphone “look at me” communication but that doesn’t make it good/useful. Twitter is not where you go to contribute value. it’s where you go to shout into the ether, look for self validation from your followers and make yourself feel better about yourself. it does nothing to produce value, it only brings value to individuals in a self centered/narcissistic way. it’s sad really. nobody searches Google and finds tweets that help them.
Tldinvestors/blogs and Namepro/forums are where you go to produce useful content that we as an industry can benefit from.
if you’re gonna do a private network, then use skype or even Namepros DM would be better than Twitter.
I will take Twitter over the cesspool that is namepros anyday.
I always wonder about people that don’t get Twitter.