Posts

No, forum links might not be as good as they once were, but that doesn't make em a bad thing. As long as you go about it the right way. You need to be able to add value to the forum. Not register and post a generic load of nonsense just to get to be able to have the right amount of posts to enable your signature. neither do you keep posting a few times after that until you think you have sufficient links pointing back to your site and move on to the next forum. Its abuse IMO, and not the reason forums are there.

They are a community of people chatting to each other about their related fields, asking for help, and actually expecting help. If you are genuine and sincere, believe you me, you would get a lot further in a forum than you could imagine. Posting quality posts, helping where you can and even reporting people that abuse the system is a good way to not only show you are a person that cares about what happens on the forum pages, but that you are not just their to drop a link and run. it goes a long way to helping promote the forum, as well as adding quality to it.

I can't speak for everyone, but I know that when I ask for help, or ask a question, I get really agitated when someone answers the post and you can clearly see they haven't even read the post, because they are talking about all sorts of other things, except what I was talking about in my thread, and staying clear of the "good post, thanks for sharing" is another way to make sure your contributions are valued in a forum.

Think about it this way. You represent not only yourself, but the company you work for, or whatever online venture you're part of. Which would you prefer, having people look at you and what you say on forums, knowing you represent these companies and / or ventures and think that they would like to see what it is you sell, or write you off completely because they can see you are not adding value of any kind, and just ghosting along to get the appropriate counts so you can link and increase your own profits?

It's worth a thought, not?

I'm in. news like this needs to be celebrated...


(drinks all 'round)

from what I can tell, this didn't come from my computer at all. I have run scans, checked for registry changes, the works. I think the way this works is that people are coding software that hacks online. Maybe they hack peoples accounts at random, so that they can send their virus infested emails. If I ever catch one.......... I really feel sorry for him/her.

I've taken every precaution I can so far. Fort Knox is shaping up rather well.

Its like these kind of people are lacking morals. I mean who invades someones private life to spread viruses around? It's not logical.

aaaaaaaaaaaw, shes adorable.

Congrats Steve. I am glad everything went well.

oi vey, the weekend I had. Emails and emails explaining to people NOT to open weird looking emails coming from my msn account. How do you explain to people that aren't alltogether computer savvy, that someone can actually gain access to your account without you knowing about it.

I have run every scan imaginable on my PC, and have created logs of recently modified registry entries to see if I can track down how they did this. But people are saying there is actually software online that can crack MSN like a wallnut.....

its not the best feeling in the world. I felt so "violated" lol knowing someone else was trawling around in my personal emails from family and friends. I mean Its my business if I was discussing aunt bessie's wart with a friend, not theirs (lol jokes).

All Jokes aside though, knowing what I know now? let me give you a few pearls of wisdom.

Everyone's heard the don't open weird looking emails right, in this case, the email literally comes from someone you know. Its an email with a link and a one liner. Click on the link and send your PC to valhalla.... for good. These links go straight to a page that contains viruses. SO be careful.

If you can set it so your password expires every 72 days, do that. It's much better than having to explain to everyone about how they got a virus from an email you sent.

Kick your PC antivirus software up a notch. My laptop is about to become Fort Knox, literally. Never keep accounts, banking details, or any other valuable information in emails. if they can hack your email, losh knows what else they can see while in there...

I really hope you guys never have to go through this. Its the worst kind of inconvenience. seriously.

LOL I remember playing around with SIMM's and DIMM's. barmy 486's and pentium 3's. Which are all but rare now. I can look around just about everywhere, and I can find PC's dating back from the 486 to the P4. But I can never find a working p3 chip. It's kinda sad really. P3's were king in those days.

Now days though, I have my Desktop for designing and gaming, and for work (which I am doing most days) I have a meek little dell Inspirion 9400. it's not all that bad, when you think about how I had to buy a 40cm laptop bag for it, which it just fits into....

They do this because many people fall into that trap. They offer a quick fix to a problem everyone has, and some really believe it works. Only to find that the money they paid for the product or service wasn't worth the countless emails sent out to promote it.

This is what makes an IM's work so hard. Not only because we have to deal and or compete with these spammers daily, but because of their antics, it gives people a tainted perspective on what we do.

This is why I believe that the questionnaire that channs is proposing is a really good way to show people exactly how IM is really done and it will let people benefit from their products or services.

I spent around 5 and a half thousand on my desktop. (ZAR by the way ) But i figured, rather build it myself than buy a generic make from a store that allowed me to do virtually nothing on it. It's a few years old now, and has had a few extras installed with time, but in the end its worth it.

I have a PC that can be used for gaming, design and art (one of my hobbies) and I am terribly proud of it, no matter how old it is. lol

Specs:

2.5GHz Dual Core AMD 4800+ chip
3 Hard drives, 1x 80 gig IDE main drive, and 2x 160Gig SATA's for storage ( looking into a 1 Tb drive lol or two)
Nvidia Chipset Motherboard, with 10 USB's 8 channel High definition audio,
A High Definition speaker system ( surround sound etc..)
17 Inch LCD screen
2 Gigs RAM (DDR2)
1Gb Nvidia Geforce graphics card.
UPS.

I have seen so many emails sent to my junk box that promise this. Boost traffic, boost sales, boost this, boost that..... I know that many people believe this and blindly buy the product, hoping it would work and that their site finally gets the traffic they think it deserves and they can make a little extra profit, only to find their money spent on a product that doesn't help them at all...

The questionnaire is a brilliant idea, but you need to have a great product or product list to back it up. Maybe showing them a preview of the product before asking them to take the questionnaire etc. Have them review it and see how it works so that they can decide.

You do have a good idea though. Many businesses use IM, but a lot of them don't use it correctly, and cannot understand why they fall short of their own expectations. Which leads me to think that they need to have the facts and a little extra education on the subject, so that IM can really work for them.