First, I want to say I understand how sensitive an issue it is to have spammers on a site linking to who-knows-what garbage they are selling. I actually run a very large forum, and have very strict rules about links and advertising.
Second, I think your nearly 100% anti-link policy for new users is detrimental to the quality of the site.
Why? Case in point - in this thread someone asked about programming MetaTrader. As part of my answer, I linked to MetaQuotes website documentation for programming scripts. The link in question was here: . As part of the response, I also linked to documentation on how to make a trailing stop, located here: .
Now, obviously, I don’t own MetaQuotes or MetaTrader, nor do I receive compensation for linking to their user manual, or selling their product (as we all know, it’s free). However, it is a platform that thousands of people use. Not being able to link to resources from your website lessens the quality of information that can be exchanged between users that is truly beneficial and educational. I think the links should have been allowed to stay simply because they increase the quality of information being discussed at this site, were not advertising, and were a valuable reference to the topic at hand.
On a near daily basis I am reading a thread here and someone posts a link, but it has been removed. I am always frustrated to think that someone posted something that could have been immensely useful to my education, but I can’t access it. It is a complete reversal on how the internet functions - [U]linking to resources is the foundation of the internet[/U]! That’s why users come here - to get new information. And if they can’t find it here, they will go elsewhere. I know that I am frequently frustrated because resources are removed from this site so I go to other sites. The sites where the moderators have a little more leeway and can be allowed to be more thoughtful when they are enforcing rules often have a lot better quality content.
Think about this - It would be like going to Google and doing a search for “Forex” and a list of matches comes back, but there are no links to any sites. Kind of useless, huh?
Anyway, I would ask you re-think your policy on removing every link from a users post without actually considering the quality of the link being posted. If you’re concerned about the site being abused by spammers, all you have to do is download the nofollow module for vBulletin which is located here: .
Otherwise, thanks for the great site, and I hope to see it continuing to improve over the years.
