Closing Off BHW From The World

Ok how about No Monthly Fee.

But maybe a yearly fee or joining fee.

Then, if you show good contribution then you get 50% refunded back to you? And then you only pay yearly?

I think it would be very shortsighted to close BHW to new members and do not agree with the idea of a paid membership as this would preclude many resouceful members from countries such as India. To limit growth of BHW if this is what you are trying to achive, you should implement a maximum number of new members per month. Secondly put in place a system that monitors existing members contributions to the forum, for instance less than 10 posts per 60 consecutive days and membership is terminated.

Close to newcomers + Small fee !

Why not closed for new signups? Or make it invite only.

I will leave if there will be a monthly fee.

I agree for a third option: make it by invite only

I voted against a monthly fee, but if it tightens things back down I'd probably pay it anyway.

I say yes for a joining fee & invite-only forum, but memebers with a certain amount of posts should be given invitation codes every while,
I agree with this idea because as previously stated, the bigger the forum gets, the less effective the methods in here become,
it's true that blackhatworld is so great that it's frightening that's its open for the public

Temporarily stop new membership.

During this time purge the membership of spammers and scammers via a thread by thread community search. VIP members and moderators would nominate a suspected scammer/spammer for termination. Final decision would come from you.

Make membership mainly invitation only with a few search engine members allowed per month. There can be a one time membership for the SEARCH ENGINE members.

* Invited members would be free.
* Only members for a certain rank or above would be allowed invitations.
* Invitation numbers would depend on Rank.

New members would be marked with a new member Icon for a certain number of posts. This would make it easier for moderators to discern if a new member was here for scamming/spamming as opposed to knowledge/sharing.

Temporarily locking BHW would allow several things to happen:

#1- Making BHW more exclusive: The purging of multiple accounts, scam accounts, and spam accounts would allow BHW to decrease it's numbers while increasing the quality percentage of the overall membership.

#2- It would allow the newbie members that are here more access to successful plans/methods. This will, as a result, increase the quality of the membership by making it easier for the current GOOD newbies to learn, modify, and share working methods.

#3- More friendly environment: A less cluttered BHW is a healthier BHW. Experts will be able to discuss advanced techniques without as much of the worry of undesirables selling said techniques on other forums, or being sent massive quantities of "GET RICH" scams via PM.

Newer members will be able to get the help they need.

Upon reopening, BHW will be a friendlier, less cluttered forum. Future members will either be pre-screened (Invitation) or temporarily policed (NEW MEMBER ICON).

I wonder how many Affiliate Manager already a member of this forum. The knowledge needs to be well guarded. Please close it. I don't mind paying.

By the way, I feel this voting should be directed to Jr VIP only Not newbie.

Well, I've voted to remain open....I've learnt a lot from this forum and guess is right others have this chance also rather than hanging on DP...

I am as fed up as the next guy of cheeky two post commenters demanding warez and posting noob questions before reading. I am all for some sort of restriction.
But to close it off to the world would deprive us all of fresh thinking.
Just look at the likes of LamLam, who is new and contributed handy tools in his first few weeks.

Easy fix... detect site entries from search engines and send them to a page for paid membership. If they aren't blackhat enough to get around that then let them pay to enter. The newbie-boomers are probably coming from 26600 indexed pages. I haven't bothered to look at your HTML but I'd bet its SEO optimized and keyword stuffed fatter than a blackhat turkey on thanksgiving.

comparco said:

I am as fed up as the next guy of cheeky two post commenters demanding warez and posting noob questions before reading. I am all for some sort of restriction.
But to close it off to the world would deprive us all of fresh thinking.
Just look at the likes of LamLam, who is new and contributed handy tools in his first few weeks.

Click to expand...

I agree. At the same time. BHW needs to be cleansed. I feel that my previous post would provide a way to clean this forum while providing a solid foundation for it's future.

My Grandad owned a pub in the second world war.

He had 5 bars in the pub.

One for the miners
One for ladies and families
One for soldiers
One for officers
and one for local professionals and politicians.

He never sectioned them off this way. People just decided for themselves which bar they felt happier in.

If the forum is structured in an effective way where newbs can go and where top black hats can go that would be great. The only thing i would say is that the newbs could miss the experienced guys advice and the smart guys would miss the newbs pathetic questions.

Frankly, i love BHW just the way it is. But it is up to Diamond Dave in the end. He made this place after all!


Rudy

for those curious if its even slightly related to a hosting issue, we have MORE than enough grunt and bandwidth to host a HELL of a lot more traffic than this and should a time arise where we dont it is very cheap with our current provider to do massive upgrades and have more than enough all over again!

charging a fee won't stop affiliate managers from coming on.

invite only seems like it would create a "clicky" type of atmosphere, where you need to know someone to join. i'm sure there are many smart people out there that would like to join but don't know any senior members here (i don't).

problem is the Site wants to make a profit (who wouldn't, i know i would too) while the members want to protect the privacy at no cost to themselves. what is the middle ground?

I credit BHW with virtually every dollar I've earned online, and while I would happily pay for it, I'd feel incredibly sorry for anyone who wasn't LUCKY enough to get here before the fee.

The information here is invaluable, and to deprive people of it who might need it the most would be wrong. Some of us might still be working day jobs without the valuable insight provided by BHW.

I understand there are challenges maintaining the site, and the integrity of information presented here, but charging a fee isn't really going to change any of that. Also, less members means less information, and less objective analysis.

I vote to keep it open.

I think invite only would be the best choice... with current members getting to keep their accounts

I am new to this site. Been in Internet Marketing for 2 months. I am on here every day learning new stuff and testing it out. If it is pay you won't be able to see people like me learning and eventually contributing with what I have learned. It seems to me that the whole benefit of BHW is that it is free. There are plenty of pay sites out there. Most of which aren't kept up to date as promised. I can refresh my screen on BHW every hour and there is fresh, excellent content. BHW Rocks! I have learned a ton from it and have put it into use for myself.

So.... as far as I understand there are different levels of BHW, one being the Jr. Vip section. Why not have minimal donations need to be made to progress past certain post counts. So your post count is locked at certain levels until a donation is made. In other words:

To progress past
50 posts = pay $5
100 posts = pay $5
150 posts = pay $5

Or:
25 posts = pay $2.50
50 posts = pay $2.50
75 posts = pay $2.50

etc..

The reason for this is that members would get out their credit cards at each level and pay the tiny fee so they could up their post count and eventually get to the Jr. Vip. And there is a good chance they will donate more than the $2.50 or $5.00 once they bother to get their credit card out. Just encourage extra donations!

It seems the rate at which these kind of threads have been popping out makes me think something drastic is about to happen PRETTY soon on this site.

The controversy of whether to make this forum an open or closed one, a paid or free one or an invite only or not is something that might soon be finalized heck maybe starting next year.

I didn't like the poll options available so I voted for closing to new members.

I know that does not sound fair considering I joined for free, but my suggestion as earlier mentioned by someone else is to close some sections like the downloads, vip sections etc..and leave open the main forum section.

Or if you want to go for the monthly fee route, then instead of having new members pay a fee outright, they can have a 15 day grace period or 15 or 30 day trial period and after that is over they pay a small fee like $9 a month or $100 a year or whatever.

Heck maybe add the fact that each month a member gets up to a 100 posts their monthly fee is waived. The posts of course would be quality posts and the mods would be the ones to grade this, not just "thanks for sharing" or "I agree with you" posts.

You may disagree with me on this but I just DO NOT agree with having new members pay a fee outright. I don't agree with existing members pay a fee either. I do agree that some of the forum sections be closed to the general public. Maybe move the downloads section to Jnr VIP and make it private.

All in all...long live BHW.

- Ca$h