there has been something like 20 fake reviews to FXCM in the last couple of weeks. Quite a few from athlonman and Exception and another 1 or 2. If you take the credibility of this site seriously, then I would suggest you rollback all reviews until June 15, 2009, and lock this broker for a few months to root out these idiots. And issue them warnings about this. Obviously Exception/Cold the idiot is beyond your capability... Perhaps you should consider preventing anyone from leaving book/broker reviews until they have at least 200 posts, and anyone gets banned if leaving more than one review. And one id should not be able to leave reviews for more than 1-2 brokers. I believe some have reviewed numerous, which obviously Anytime you see reviews of almost all 0s or all 5s, it is likely to be fake or a newbie with nothing to say. As I said before, I also suggest you prevent any IP/user ID from adding more than one review (there are many with multiple reviews from the same ID). Free for all reviews went out with the wikipedia age. They learned you need to prevent anonymous people from promoting themselves or getting into arguments via things like reviews. Maybe you need to assign moderators to the controversial brokers, like FXCM or InteractiveBrokers or books. You can do this in concert with "no review gets into the book or broker section until first checked with moderators." Better no review than fake or flame war reviews. http://elitetrader.com/br/index.cfm?action=view&R_FirmID=212&start=16 Until the day you stop allowing people to anonymously go all over this forum spamming, shilling, getting to flame wars like this. Getting 30-50 aliases, etc... You need to decide whether this is a serious business or a game room.
I stumbled across another message board last week - non-trading related - that did not allow any user with under 100 posts to post a link or ask a question about a vendor or website. In ET terms, that would mean anyone with under 100 posts who includes a hyperlink in their post, or talks about/asks a question about a service, broker, website, etc. would be deleted. Just a thought.
I have posted that a few times, but silence. It seems like the only ones who say "gee, what do you think about advisory service whatever.com" always seem to have only a few posts. And many times, someone else with a few posts chimes in about the same or related sites... And since the site does not prevent it, of course, that encourages shills to give it a try. If I had a forum, that would be one of the first 5-10 things I would do.
The broker review section is a joke. I don't see why it has pride of place on the homepage. Why do all the bad AMP trading reviews get deleted?
We had someone hitting 3 brokerage accounts with fake reviews. One of them was AMP. We deleted his reviews and banned his account.
Joe, may I also make these two suggestions: 1) Delete all brokers, books and software on those list with 0 (zero) reviews, that has been there at least 18 months. There are far more brokers/books and software than those, and if no one has commented, it just clutters the categories. 2) Put a clear "request a broker/book/software" link on the lefthand side above the lists. By doing this, you get rid of uninteresting entities, and make it easy for someone to know how to add a new one that MIGHT be interesting.
There is no way for us to track what is a new listing and what is old. The database was not set up that way. Authors suggest books for us to upload, but members may never have rated it. The authors will just come back and request their book to be listed.
Since you have so many ideas on how a forum should be run, why don't you open one. The odds of success are not high, but if your ideas are in line with what the end users really want, you will make it, and it will be a great forum that people will visit, enjoy and you will make a nice amount of money on it.
*sheesh * don't you ever turn off the money-making and business opportunity mode? I was not talking to you, but to the mods and owners. This is a trading forum. Since you seem to forget that you recently left permanently twice in couple of days, why don't you post a few things related to trading (not how to open a business or trading room or how much money you made for other people or other self-promotionals?)