What on earth is happening to Babypips? It doesn’t seem to matter what forum or thread I read, every fourth or fifth post is complete garbage and doesn’t make any sense. Lexys picked up on it several times but it still continues. Are there any moderators out there?
Thanks for starting this thread …
There are moderators in here, and to be fair to them, they’re providing a greatly improved spam-clearance service: almost everything [I][U]overtly promotional[/U][/I] I “report” now gets deleted [I]really[/I] promptly, which is a huge improvement, and I’m [U]very[/U] grateful for it. 
However, the “gibberish”/“garbage”-level seems to be getting worse and worse, and it seems not to be possible to get anything done about it at all.
I think the moderators’ position on this issue is probably that such posts aren’t technically against the rules, and they don’t see their job as being one of “quality control”. (How I’d love that to change, and how much it would benefit the whole site and its future traffic, participation and income!).
It’s absolutely true that the forum’s filling up with nonsense, and it’s terribly frustrating. It’s no stretch of the imagination to see how off-putting it must be to potential new members, but with great disappointment, after many private conversations with staff about it, I’ve now more or less given up trying to get anything done about it.
The moderators [U]will[/U] remove posts which are “stolen content, pasted-in” if they’re all reported one at a time, quoting in the report the url from which each was taken (and some of those posts are nonsense, too, so there [I]is[/I] an overlap, there), but it seems we can do nothing about all the rest. And that’s a great shame.
Appreciate your response. I take the point about the mods and ‘quality control’, but the persistence of a handful of posters (or one poster with several accounts - is that even allowed?) suggests that whoever it is has an underlying agenda, and one that has nothing to do with making meaningful contributions to the site.
Thanks for your efforts to date in trying to resolve this.
I have noticed the same thing and it is extremely frustrating. (I am probably one of the biggest contributors of gibberish here but at least I try to justify it! 
).
As Lexy says, it is difficult to expect moderators to execute quality assessments. Maybe it is an inherent problem of being a site aimed at beginners that it attracts an above-average volume of these problems.
Maybe the apparentness of the problem is also exaggerated by the lack of serious threads about actual trading methods and strategies. There are a trillion one-liners about “must have a good method”, “must have good risk management” etc without any deeper penetration than that.
At the same time any threads dealing with macabre topics like how many people lose money, who are the bad brokers, is trading gambling, etc create endless, exstatic, obsessive, attention from a mass cult of one-line forex “experts”.
By way of example,Turbo has just started a very good thread introducing a very different method of
trading and it has generated zero interest/contribution so far - but there are at least three threads ongoing about how many lose, can we really succeed, are we gambling? etc.
Another irritating thing is when someone comes here and asks a question, and gets a number of serious replies, they never return to comment on them. There is a current thread that is bumped every now and again about “don’t kill the spirit (of Newbies)”. One could easily also have a thread for don’t kill the spirit of the serious contributors!
But I guess there will always be those who get a kick from seeing their posts on the net and a thrill from pretending they are some kind of forex maestro - even if they fool nobody but themselves…
Maybe it’s “just my perspective”, but it seems to me that posters in trading forums are actually [U]attracted[/U] to failure, as can clearly be seen from the relationship between “views” figures and thread-lengths for most threads with anything negative in their titles.
This isn’t limited to BabyPips. The same is true in other trading forums: in particular, threads containing accounts of an individual’s struggles nearly always get a “disproportional” amount of views, albeit not necessarily [I]responses[/I]. (This may, to a small extent, be explained away by the fact that it’s also normal for people to want to help, so when they see someone struggling they try and help - but that’s about numbers of responses, not [I]views[/I]).
In fact, this isn’t even limited just to trading forums: there are entire so-called “news” websites, some of them comparatively mainstream, whose [I]entire business model[/I] is more or less built on negativity. 
You all know how little psychological insight I have, because of my own mental state, but I wonder whether people relate to failure because it is easier: they’ve experienced it; they understand it; ploughing through such threads perhaps provides them some comfort?
Call me uncharitable, but might there even be a component of [I]schadenfreude[/I] in it, too? 
It really wasn’t this bad 5 years ago, I’ve seen many highly regarded members drop off over he years for that exact reason. I don’t know what more can be done about it, I’m starting to drift away again. Just becomes very repetitive and dull…
Exactly so.
They say so openly, too - some here, and some elsewhere.
A small group of 6-8 people habitually posting trite, meaningless, generalised garbage, day in, day out (as we have at the moment), if left unchecked, can gradually drive away a huge group of contributing members, and dissuade equally many others from joining and posting.
(My own opinion is that they’re [B][U]more[/U][/B] of a problem than the spammers, because spam’s actually easier to deal with, as has recently been well demonstrated).
It irritates me because I think it’s actually a [U]very[/U] easily solvable problem (and without “banning” anyone, naturally).
I do … but it requires some co-operation from the forum’s management, and unfortunately that just isn’t forthcoming. Not on this subject. [I]That [B]is[/B] their right, of course, and we don’t have the right to anything about it[/I] except drift away, ourselves (as I did, once, previously, but came back again, mostly because Manxx was still here and still posting).
I’m really sorry to hear it.
I do understand, though.
No forum can tolerate the garbage that’s posted here by a small group of nonsense-posters [B][U]and[/U][/B] maintain an environment in which traders’ attention and presence will be sustained over the long-term: the two things are ultimately just incompatible. :58:
The above points re the negativity seem to be a relatively recent phenomena? Maybe this is symptomatic of an influx of many people new to trading who either don’t have enough cash to get started, had the cash and immediately blew it, or who are too apprehensive to even get started?
Fair enough, we’ve probably all been in at least one of those situations at some point (I’m in one at the moment!) and the attraction to those who are struggling, looking to try and learn what mistakes not to make (how not to do it) is perhaps understandable if not logical.
My inexperienced view is that how to trade, and how not to trade should be learnt from people who know what they’re doing, whereas, as Lexys has noted, going by views and responses, there is a disproportionate interest in the threads of contributors who are struggling.
I’m sure that when I first dipped my toe in the water around 5 years ago, spending many happy hours on Babypips, the threads were much more positive and constructive. Speaking of which, what happened to Best Forex Trading Systems Hall of Fame? It doesn’t appear to have been updated since July 2013? Is that because there hasn’t been any new systems?
I understand that copying a trading method/strategy slavishly isn’t advisable, but as a basis for ideas development, it isn’t a bad place to start (depending on the expertise and knowledge of the originator of course).
“Turbo has just started a very good thread introducing a very different method of
trading”
Thanks for that Manxx, I’ll investigate.
What keeps people interested in reading these forums is informative and inspiring content. If this can be consistently maintained then any spamming content will become irrelevant?
I agree … but the reality predicates that it’s the nonsense-posting (and to a lesser extent, [I]historically[/I], the spamming problems over which the moderators [U]are[/U] now taking action) that prevents that from happening.
In this case I always tell people: want changes - start from yourself!
Rookie questions may enlist only an answer than newbie understand. I don’t see any issue with it. When somebody asks where to starts from he expects an answer with basic directions like “pay attention to money management” use stop loss, take profit, or don’t play with the high leverage. We can penetrate into the connection of bond market with risk sentiments, yield curve targeting, inflation, interest rate, relation of productivity to consumer expenditures, statistics, probability theory.
But its useless information at first stages of learning process. Trading is mostly a self-study and stupid questions will always find garbage answers.
Gibberish was one of the reasons many of us were happy when you got banned. So the question is, what backroom deal did you do to get back on site. As a noob who has progress a little (although not as much as one had hoped) I can tell you that your gibberish has help no-one. And that’s a fact.
You are - [I]as ever[/I] - [U]totally[/U] missing the point, and are also part of [B]both[/B] the problems we’re discussing here (the spam [U]and[/U] the nonsense-posts), not part of the solution. The irony of it! :rolleyes:
Do you know that these prattling posters could be Honorary FX-Men in a few short years .
Now how amazingly brilliant would that be :o
Yep, kind of diminishes the whole meaning of BP right there!
Unlike several of you, I think the moderators are doing a good job of maintaining order on this forum, without turning it into a police state.
Spam gets removed quickly. Case in point, very early Friday morning (around 1 or 2 am, New York time), a poster named Julia-something-or-other spammed the forum with advertising. I hit the “report post” button – as, I’m sure, some other night-owls did, as well – and, in very short order, Julia and her spam were gone.
Shortly thereafter, some bozo posted stupid one-liners on about 8 different threads here in the Melting Pot forum. I didn’t report that incident, thinking (1) there’s no minimum IQ required to join Babypips, or to post here, and (2) the line between maintaining order and establishing a police state is often a fuzzy one, so it’s probably better to err on the side of tolerance. Some of you, no doubt, will disagree. And, maybe some of you hit the “report post” button, even as I was refraining from doing so. In any event, all of that foolishness (and its perpetrator) got removed from the site soon thereafter. I wasn’t sad to see it gone.
Jezzode’s perception is that the forum wasn’t plagued by these problems five years ago. But, I disagree. I’ve been around here long enough to remember several campaigns by Babypips members to root out all sorts of disruptive characters – from sock-puppets to outright trolls.
Speaking of trolls, I think this is rather ironic: Just last week, I jotted down some thoughts on the troll-wars we fought here years ago – thoughts which I did not post at the time. Now, I think I’ll post them, just because they contrast with some of the things said in this thread. So, here goes.
Musings regarding forum-trolls – things I thought about last week, but didn’t post:
In recent years, forum trolls have found Babypips to be a very tough place in which to conduct their juvenile antics.
Some of you old-timers will remember THIS THREAD from 7 years ago.
Back in the day, we had a lot of fun tormenting the forum trolls who showed up here.
Gee, sometimes I get nostalgic for the good old days. But, I digress.
Apparently, forum trolls have fallen on hard times. They’ve put their house up for sale —
Seven years ago, forumtrolls.com did not exist as a website. It was a joke, invented for the troll thread. Since then, apparently, someone has registered the domain-name. I wonder whether it was ever active, and if so whether it attracted any trolls.
Last point – I think it would be a good idea to get rid of the labels (Newbie, Junior Member, etc.) assigned to forum members. Not only are they misleading, in many cases they are downright insulting. Consider two people who join Babypips on the same day. One person has had several years of successful trading experience in forex and other markets, and the other person just learned about trading for the first time yesterday. Both of these new members get labeled “Newbie”, but they couldn’t be more different from one another. Lumping them together under one label is silly. Your thoughts?
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Indeed - it does, but to be fair that’s been well acknowledged in this thread. There’s been a huge improvement on that front, and it’s much appreciated.
Regarding the nonsense-posting, however, I’ve seen forums that have done very well by stamping it out, and nobody can possibly deny that it’s costing the forum members, participation and traffic, when people are stating openly that it’s their reason for leaving.
I agree with this. (I’ve never been too comfortable about being an “Fx-[I][U]man[/U][/I]”, to be honest.) But I take your other points, as well.
I see your point.
I logged on about an hour ago, and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Another bozo – this one calling himself LeoForex1 – had scattered evidence of his single-digit IQ all over the Melting Pot.
After all the discussion in this thread about nonsense posts, he showed up [I]-- just like a troll would do --[/I] to throw nonsense in our faces.
Tellingly, he didn’t post in [I]this thread,[/I] apparently feeling the heat here.
I decided you’re right, Lexy. These fools are just vandalizing the forum, and tolerating them is foolish.
I hit the “report post” button, to report his [B]advertising[/B] in the thread he created, and also to report his [B]nonsense posts[/B] in five other threads. Almost immediately, his garbage started to disappear.
(I suspect that I was late to the party, and the moderator was actually responding to [I]someone else’s[/I] prior reporting – yours, perhaps, Lexy?)
In any case, BozoLeo and his graffiti will be gone soon.
Lexy darlin’, you’ve won me over to your point of view. From now on, I will help you root out the bozo’s.
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Good thread, I’m surprised I hadn’t spotted it earlier.
Agree with most of what Clint and Lexy say here, also mildly amused that one of the biggest spouters of gibberish has posted here.
100% agree with the idea of removing the labels, it may even encourage some to run up their post count just to get a better title.
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May 2018, now - and far from being resolved, this problem really seems to be getting worse and worse and worse, doesn’t it?
I see members increasingly commenting on it, in the forum, but apparently nobody takes any notice?
How is it that all the other trading forums seem to avoid this problem, but here at BP it seems to irritate the “older members” so much that most of them gradually leave. That’s a “member retention problem and a half”, isn’t it?!
Is it because all the other forums kick out all the gibberish-posters, so they all come here because they know this is the only place on the web where they can post complete nonsense for ever without being removed?
What can be done about this problem, please?
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