It's been my personal observation that there is relatively little difference in the quality of posts between the pay sites and the free ones. The ratio of posters worth reading to posters that aren't is and probably always will be very low.
pff I don't understand why people are freaking out about that : they can't use the ignore button or what ? I have used it for nonsense and others so... I rather suggest a chart on politness: no personal attack for example ...
I'm with BobCathy. If this site started charging, I'd have to ditch it in a heartbeat. It's not that I don't have the money; it's that really I haven't learned ANYTHING here. It's sad but true. It wouldn't be worth it. ET is entertaining but not educational for the most part. There's a couple good posters who always have something insightful to say, but recently I mostly like harrytrader's underground conspiracy links, but they don't help me with my trading! If the Troll problem becomes too much of a problem (I don't really think it is a big problem yet), the easy answer is to switch to SlashCode. This is a free system used by Slashdot and others. It allows the readers to moderate which posts are insightful and not insightful (frequency of moderation is based on how respected the moderators are in the community). The system works well. If you have a low tolerance for crap, you read Slashdot at +3 posts or above, and it cuts out the lower posts. If you have lots of time for crap, you read at -1 quality. Slashcode is very flexible, but ET is really fine as it is, IMHO. You can't please all the people all the time....
Agreed. I would also add, create a pay for site, that has no moderation for the chit chat and non productive post.
Chit Chat is useful to me (as a mod) as a place to dump threads that have either wandered off topic, or never were on the forum topic to begin with. Advertising pays for all this, and eyeballs are one of the things the sponors like (I think anyway - I'm completely seperate from the business side). So, Chit Chat helps pay the bills, and keeps the distractions down by being in a seperate forum. But I do like the one-time registration fee idea. And I think it would be great to have a one-alias per person rule.
Are there any other message boards out there that are pay based? Usually there has to be some proprietary material to command some sort of premium from viewers.
Silicon Investor used to be fee based (with free access for clients of certain brokers). Not sure about their current status.
Mind as well, just close the thread or just delete it. All mods doing it strictly, should send a message to the whole community. I'm sure there will be some posts that causes a legit thread to go off but that can be done by just erasing the post itself and proceeding reply of it. Also, there are no sponsors on Chit Chat. As long as the site is moderated in a clear standard and strictly enforced. I'm sure this site will get some respect from the professional trading community, which lacks in, right now. This is not a matter of having the site paying or non-paying.
Problem is, some of those threads that are off-forum-topic are interesting. And it'd be a shame to dump them to write-only memory. It doesn't matter that Chit-Chat does not have a sponsor, the whole board gets the hit rate.