100 Reasons Digital Point Sucks
Posted by: James Lewitzke

For those that aren’t familiar with DP, I’ve composed a list of one hundred reasons to avoid that place (in no particular order):

   1. It’s Spammer infested
   2. They think Google’s Toolbar PageRank is important (which it’s not)
   3. They think submitting to Web Directories is important
   4. They think Reciprocal Link Building is important
   5. They think Article Submissions are important
   6. They think Press Releases are important
   7. They think submitting via Social Bookmarks is important
   8. They actually applaud participation in Link Programs
   9. No creative Forum Icons
  10. They think “Google is Evil”
  11. They promote splogs
  12. They promote Espionage
  13. They promote Link Scheming
  14. They promote Blackhat SEO techniques
  15. They promote Stumble Exchanges
  16. They promote Digg Exchanges
  17. They promote Clickbank Posts
  18. It sits on a sub-domain
  19. It’s too big
  20. Members have tried to sell their accounts
  21. Trying to filter all the good posts from the bad posts is like finding a needle in a haystack
  22. They actually have an “Interesting Junk” dropdown menu in their forum toolbar (Under “Fun Stuff”)
  23. Reputation is disabled in the “Members List”
  24. For DP: Quantity > Quality
  25. Their “Greenish” Color Scheme reminds me of Vomit
  26. Their Link Exchange / Sales Forums have over 460,000 posts
  27. They banned Alexander the Great
  28. They have an entire forum devoted to Keyword Tracking
  29. The Administrators don’t care about the quality of the forums
  30. The Moderators don’t care about the quality of the forums
  31. They hire paid forum posters
  32. Just look at some of Nintendo’s Pictures
  33. They ban members for silly reasons (like thread bumping)
  34. They got banned from Stumble Upon
  35. There’s a”Politics and Religion” sub-forum, it’s suppose to be a webmaster forum
  36. Everything is about links, links, and more links to them
  37. Insults seem to be tolerated (like here)
  38. Just looking at the site hurts my eyes
  39. Threads often go off-topic
  40. Don’t Piss off Crazy_Rob, he’ll ban you
  41. They actually have a “Personal Attacks” Sticky, as if insults weren’t obviously bad.
  42. Copy and Pasted Articles flourish
  43. Too many self-promo threads
  44. Too many link-drop threads
  45. Some members are arrogant, and believe competing communities are jealous.
  46. They condescend towards Doug Heil as if his IHY community is second-rate
  47. Lots of cell phone spam
  48. They overvalue “Article Marketing”
  49. Many new webmasters get sucked into their logic
  50. Profanity filter is turned off
  51. Their logo’s odd
  52. You can’t even make out what’s underneath their logo (it looks something like a barcode)
  53. All their “Google” Stickies relate to PR
  54. People who generally try to help others out go relatively unnoticed
  55. Their membergroups are insulting (Peon, Grunt, etc.)
  56. They have over 500 self-proclaimed “SEO Experts“
  57. The forums look nothing like the main site
  58. Their forum design is uninspiring
  59. They don’t care who they ban, even high-ranking contributing members
  60. HTML isn’t a sub-forum of programming, like the rest of the web languages
  61. There is no moderation accountability
  62. There is barely any reputation accountability
  63. They actually have a marketplace for website traffic, as if having something to unique to offer your visitors isn’t enough
  64. Sorting through the filth gives me a headache
  65. Members get super freaked out when DP goes offline
  66. The guy who wrote the Reputation FAQ is banned
  67. “Who’s Online” options are severely limited
  68. The forum’s “Get-rich-quick” logic undermines the purpose of the web and internet
  69. Some actually try to sell blackhat methods to newbies
  70. It gives off a “Creepy, Slyish” vibe
  71. Definitely not enough moderation for a board their size
  72. They don’t welcome new members well (usually you get a welcome PM from an admin, but not from DP)
  73. They are arrogant enough to have their own “DPified” Google FAQ
  74. Allowing users to switch between vBulletin styles makes the site look unprofessional
  75. Many threads aren’t even posted in the right forums
  76. They have no Design & Development stickies. Wouldn’t some coding resources be useful for creating a “good” website?
  77. They have a “Legal Issues” forum, anyone else detect the oxymoron?
  78. The site’s owner (Shawn) isn’t even active much on the forum, (I doubt he even has that much influence anymore)
  79. Popular ≠ Valuable
  80. Absolutely no forum for “Site News and Updates” can be found
  81. There’s no specific DP copyright info for the forums (it should be at the bottom, near the vB copyright info)
  82. It’s server is often slow
  83. Limited selection of “Digital Point Solutions Tools”
  84. “Forum Jump”, for the most part, is *pointless*
  85. Everything’s about money over there (with entire forums dedicated to affiliate programs and PPC advertising, not to mention the 2,000,000+ posts in the DP marketplace)
  86. They have two seperate sub-forums for Google Adwords
  87. Whitehat SEO is virtually nonexistent
  88. Web hosting is also virtually nonexistent
  89. Read this post
  90. Or read this post
  91. Many members’ signature links are filled with pointless links with anchor text such as “PR4 Link Exchange” or “Hot Thai Girls”, etc.
  92. Their Directory forum is underneath the “Search Engine” Category, do they even know what a Directory is?
  93. No web marketing advice for long term site stability
  94. For allowing usernames like FuckingPirate and Shittywall to exist
  95. They tend to be hypocritical (they don’t mind manipulating sites like Digg and Stumbleupon, but when it comes to Ethical Legal Issues, there’s nothing pertaining to internet marketing)
  96. Their spammy ideas and link schemes sometimes spill over into other forums
  97. Difficult to understand the site name, and how it relates to the web
  98. The community doesn’t collectively care about long-term website worthiness
  99. Did I mention it’s a spammer heaven yet?
 100. A community containing that much filth isn’t worthy of all the backlinks gained from this blog post

I could probably have come up with more, but I’m too tired to think right now.

(UPDATE 4/20/2008 = I’ve opened up a new blog post about this list over here, so all questions and comments should be directed there.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 1:06 am and is filed under Online Communities, Rants, Satire, Spam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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66 Comments
Comment by Adam Senour
2007-12-21 00:32:18

Only 100 reasons? You were being way too nice.
 
Comment by James Lewitzke
2007-12-21 11:09:08

Yeah, I know.

Maybe I’ll write a “sequel list” in the future (If I feel like it).
 
Comment by PPC
2007-12-22 00:40:06

they don’t value their members. god bless dp :P
 
Comment by Dan
2007-12-26 10:07:54

Wow! Nice list :D This is certainly getting a mention on my blog :)
 
Comment by James Lewitzke
2007-12-26 10:39:14

Glad you enjoyed the list Dan :)
 
Comment by Forrest
2008-01-03 20:58:03

The guy who wrote their reputation faq is banned … I’ve never heard anything so absurd! What did he do to get banned, forget to spell check something he was explaining?
 
Comment by James Lewitzke
2008-01-03 23:51:28

I’m not sure *why* he was banned either, the reason might not even be related to the rep FAQ.
 
Comment by ravi
2008-01-16 16:00:05

Ho ho …….
very funny..and may be correct to some extent..
 
Comment by MrBob
2008-01-16 16:02:27

This whole thing is based upon your ignorance. DP Forum isnt just one person or or one viewpoint. It is made up of many different people with many different opinions and ideas.
 
Comment by Samantha Pia
2008-01-16 16:35:23

101 it is infested with Scammer to a point where members are scammed out of $10,000 a week or more.

Sammie xXx
 
Comment by James Lewitzke
2008-01-16 16:36:07

@MrBob - So it’s based on my “ignorance”, how? Are these points wrong in some way?

@Samantha - I’ll consider stating that point if I ever make a sequel list :) , although some points could be mixed in with scamming. (Plus I think you’ll like #59)
 
Comment by Phonny
2008-01-16 17:25:01

LoL - The site makes money thats all the owner cares, he became super famous, he careless what is going on inside the forum lol, but I do agree that they BAN you for no reason but big forums like DP needs quick actions and some mods and admins there suck ass they think they OWN DP, they ban you for real if they get pissed for some odd reason, they gotta get a real life..
 
Comment by Chris
2008-01-16 18:14:22

YES!!! Finally someone has said it!!! I knew it all the time, but I was stuck over there thinking there wasn’t any worth wild web forums out there.

The thing that annoys me over there is people plugging a service. You ask a genuine question and someone comes in and says, “Well, I can do it, for a price.” Thanks douchebag, you’re a big help.

Thank you. Thank you for saying it.
 
Comment by James Lewitzke
2008-01-16 18:48:48

Glad I could help
 
Comment by chopsticks
2008-01-16 19:18:20

Not gonna go through it again but did you mention the fact that a lot of members don’t read beyond the OP before they reply and some even yet only seem to read the thread title? Repetitive answers “for the win”, it’s surprising how many times you’ll see the same answer to the question in a row as if people are completely oblivious to the above/previous post.

There also seems to be quite a few answers given by members which are completely unrelated to the original question.

Lastly, they should only let people who have validated their email address post. (or so i’ve heard the light green usernames are unvalidated)
 
Comment by Proudly Ex-DP Member
2008-01-16 21:03:23

You have missed dozen of many other reasons like poiinting at the Coward of County (aka Shawn Hogan) running away as soon as banning people began, then presumably returning anonymously so no one can see he is at the forum all the time.

Of course he has a thousand of ass-kissers saying he is doing business, having fun with girls or anything else, but naming Crazy Rob admin is the real funny thing. I have never seen somethin more inept around, except Katy.

Even worst, there is an increasing rumour in other forums stating that Shawn is giving “backstage” lessons on how to be a rude moderator so as soon as someone post something they don’t like threads are immediately closed with two or three hard words as explanation.

All of this and the lack of interest supporting Digital Point paid clients or thanking people still donating to server makes of DP the fastest growing debacle’s candidate of 2008.
 
Comment by Myspace Proxy
2008-01-16 21:09:43

I believe most of them are true but i still inlove at DP! :)
 
Comment by Zerosleep
2008-01-16 22:35:58

LOL!, some points u mentioned are valid :)
 
Comment by Don
2008-01-16 22:52:29

19. It’s too big - isn’t it EVERY forum owner’s dream to make their forum big?
 
Comment by WhyuhateDP
2008-01-17 01:47:34

James,
the points you have mentioned probably applies to almost all the
busiest forums. To single out DP is like a case of sour grapes.
Granted DP has its own unique faults,but to trash an entire community
is pointless and reveals your ignorance.
There are very good knowledgeable users who can give other forum users
a run for their money.
Lots of people have earned good money from DP and even noobs can
earn money and several have started their online careers on DP which is
more than anyone can say of their own forums.
Better to be in a forum like DP than being stuck in a snob forum where
knowing the right members counts and being a noobie is a curse!
If you dont know what I am referring to be a warrior.
 
Comment by tao
2008-01-17 09:48:48

101. SHAWN D. HOGAN
 
Comment by Justice McCay
2008-01-17 12:18:31

Greetings.

It seems to me that you are most-likely a banned member at Digital Point Forums, thus the reason for the hate blog post. Perhaps you can edit your blog post and tell everyone your user-name and why exactly you were banned from DP?

I actually took the time to read through your entire list of “the cons of Digital Point Forums” and there are only a few that seem accurate. Maybe you decided to list the cons because you didn’t have the time to experience the good aspects of Digital Point Forums before you were banned?

Firstly, I am not necessarily here to defend Digital Point, but I am here to voice out my opinion towards your blog post.

Digital Point Forums, in my opinion, doesn’t have enough moderators and administrators - you’re right about that and I’ll agree with you; however, for having such a limited amount of forum staff members, they do a superb job moderating the forums and maintaining such a large forum in a decent timely manner.

There are a few horrible points which I would like to address to you that you tried to make. For the majority of your list, you repeated yourself or just made horrible points.

Digital Point’s server is slow sometimes because it is so popular. Everyone knows that big forums like Digital Point Forums, powered by vBulletin, is an easy target for hackers and DDoS attacks - on top of that, there is a lot of people constantly visiting the site, straining even their “leet” powerful server.

I don’t see why you complain about people claiming themselves as “SEO Experts” - people who have experienced some good techniques with SEO have the right to share it with others, and that’s what a forum is all about: teaching, learning, and discussing with each other. There’s always something new to learn about SEO, and there’s always some new method or strategy that *can* work for you, so it’s definitely worth reading on what some self-proclaimed “SEO Gurus” there have to say.

The final thing I would like to point out is regarding the content of Digital Point Forums. The forums were originally intended for discussion regarding Digital Point’s webmaster tools and have now evolved into a massive discussion forum for webmasters. Digital Point simply created the categories and forums for discussion within vBulletin’s forum system; under no circumstance do they promote or endorse any content published onto their forum that does not regard an official product/webmaster tool of Digital Point.

Members are accountable for what they post - that includes a tactic for search engine optimization including blackhat techniques and generally offensive/hateful posts. Digital Point does not endorse or recognize member posts as an expressive opinion of the company; members represent themselves through their posts, just like on any other forum. Grant it, because of the low number of forum staff, it may take a while for a reported offensive post to be deleted, but it will still be done. The forum is so large right now that it is difficult for all the forum staff to view every single post made - that’s why vBulletin has the nice “report post” feature.

Digital Point Forums is one of, if not the largest webmaster forums on the Internet. The forums contain a lot of valuable information that is useful for webmasters, and serves its intended purpose well as a webmaster discussion forum.

Even I have got infractions and have been banned before. There’s usually a reason why members get infractions and banned…if not always. Perhaps your blog post was created out of mere jealousy of a live success? You tell me.
 
Comment by James Lewitzke
2008-01-17 12:38:54

Contrary to what the community may think, I’m not a DP member “hater”, Perhaps the DP crowd could take points from my list and use it as examples to improve their community. Will anything be done about it? I doubt it.

Of course some of it was meant to be humorous, it’s makes the list easier to read through and provides some shock value, regardless of whether the point sounds ridiculous or not (and as you can see, it worked pretty well, given some of the responses).

Oh, and lastly I am NOT a banned member, holding some personal grudge or anything.

I’ll be over at WT here, as some of you may have already noticed, if anyone wishes to debate further.
 
Comment by Igor
2008-01-17 13:07:08

Dude you are so wrong - Alexander the Great IS NOT BANNED!!!!
 
Comment by James Lewitzke
2008-01-17 13:50:36

Well, he was banned when I wrote this. Maybe it was just a temporary ban then.
 
Comment by menj
2008-01-17 21:51:16

Hahaha…I had a good laugh reading this and I can attest that all the points here are true. Especially #40, that bastard is doing no service to DP with his pompous ego. I am not going to reveal my DP username here because if I do and if he reads this, he will just ban me out of spite. He did that to Jen before.
 
Comment by nBridges Media
2008-01-17 23:17:47

Have to appreciate the effort
 
Comment by Forrest
2008-01-18 01:03:36

I have to point out two objections to Justice’s reply that … just don’t make sense to me:

> It seems to me that you are most-likely a banned member at Digital Point Forums, thus the reason for the hate blog post. Perhaps you can edit your blog post and tell everyone your user-name and why exactly you were banned from DP?

That’s a tremendous amount of certainty. Is having been banned REALLY the ONLY reason a person could have an unflattering opinion of DP?

> I actually took the time to read through your entire list of “the cons of Digital Point Forums” and there are only a few that seem accurate. Maybe you decided to list the cons because you didn’t have the time to experience the good aspects of Digital Point Forums before you were banned?

Again with the almost religious certainty.

Only a few that seem accurate … I just checked, and the guy who wrote their reputation faq is still banned. That’s not just accurate; it looks really bad! Stumble - and other DP posters - confirms the ban. And so on. It’s easy to say “it’s not true!!” but it’s also pretty easy to verify.
 
Comment by Forrest
2008-01-18 01:17:54

PS - I just reread #45: Some members are arrogant, and believe competing communities are jealous.
 
Comment by James Lewitzke
2008-01-18 12:47:36

Those are good points, Forrest.
 
Comment by Nintendo
2008-01-19 02:35:32

Hey, AnthonyCea, is that you!!!!!!!!

Bah!!! My pictures are kool!!!!!!!!!!!
 
Comment by DigitalPoint
2008-01-19 05:27:26

Yeah, Digitalpoint SUCKS!!!!!!!!
 
Comment by Gerwin John D. Rodriguez
2008-01-19 05:43:15

Some of your point are right but also consider that DP is a great forum whatever it takes! :D
 
Comment by James Lewitzke
2008-01-19 12:13:30

@Nintendo - if you’re asking me, then no, I have no idea who that is.
 
Comment by Dolin
2008-01-19 17:05:16

Digitalpoint forum sucks like monkey balls. Check out this and see how insecure the site is. The person googsmaster who is an inoocent victim of hacking is banned when he is asking for help. There are many members being hacked by a pm link today and the webmaster can’t be bothered to take the responsibility of helping out those victims of hacked accounts but instead ban them to shut them up.
 
Comment by Anthony SEA
2008-01-24 02:31:44

Digital Point Sucks, but surfer which reply is number #36 sucks even more, trying to profit with Digitalpoint stinky staff and behavior and not hidding his whois information

dpsucks.com (parked domain)
van Romburgh, Jan domains@mesaverdeenterprises.com
Mesa Verde Enterprises
PO Box 694
Cortez, Colorado 81321
United States
(603) 457-2570
 
Comment by Ceesil
2008-01-24 11:31:13

They promote freelance who when ever banned create new account with new name and again fool the members. DP Cannot do any thing. Most of members are from India and all they are poor people and just try to make fraud on DP and earn money. they use virtual IP to login with different account and cheat the people. So every Indian is spamming and earning money with black hat SEO. DP promote and encourage all members to use all technique to spam Google, Digg and other big sites. All kind of black hat services are sold there

It is not a place for corporate as the moderator are free lancer and they ban all corporate or big account. Moderators are also into same business and ban all big good accounts.

So the DP has lost its standard as a big forum they need hits what ever may be cause white or black They cannot become big one this policies.
 
Comment by i love/hate DP
2008-01-29 12:17:36

i love and hate it
love : as i made $$$$ with it
hate : they banned my last 4 accounts:)
 
Comment by Youknowwhat
2008-01-31 16:31:19

Beside the great amount of things I hate about DP, but I must admit that there’s some good in it, is the fact that when someone posts a question, you are the first to give a good answer and few hours later the same post has 3-4 pages with ppl saying exactly the same damn thing you said.
 
Comment by Jimz
2008-02-09 04:05:15

The Buy-Sell portion of DP still has marginal value (be careful!).
The rest is mostly get-rich-quick spam, incoherent ramblings, political bs, or kiddie topics. JMO
 
Comment by Dansgalaxy
2008-02-21 20:07:11

After reading this i REALLY wish i could be a admin on there and turn the site arround, it would be so easy to make some simple imporvements.

Any chance if i emailed the owner politely you think it would happen? ..

Dan :D

P.S i just signed up… im bored want so entertainment.
 
Comment by James Lewitzke
2008-02-21 20:52:48

Be careful over there Dan, no telling what you’ll encounter ;)
 
Comment by InfectedByBugs
2008-02-23 17:49:00

Your info is not real accurate, dp is not what thinks those things, its the members who are simply missinformed.
 
Comment by James Lewitzke
2008-02-23 19:11:16

Shannon, have you clicked through the links I provided?
 
Comment by James
2008-03-25 10:18:46

Hello,

Great job. I really enjoyed Reading it. DP SUX FOR SURE!

The admin’s , Mods and Scammers are USELSS things there.

Good job!
 
Comment by James Lewitzke
2008-03-25 17:04:23

Thanks for the feedback, James :) (Great name, BTW)
 
Comment by Anonymous
2008-03-30 04:15:18

QUESTION: HOW DO DP MODS DETECT MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS??

DO THEY DETECT PROXIES ALSO AND HIDDEN IP ADDRESSES?
 
Comment by James Lewitzke
2008-03-30 12:11:01

vBulletin comes with more “hidden icons” than regular users can see. In the postbit, there is a default “computer” icon that displays what IP the message came from, that only admins and mods can see, I know this because I run my own vB forum.
 
Comment by GameOver
2008-04-12 22:56:17

100 Reasons DP Sucks (Counter Argument)
 
Comment by andy
2008-04-13 00:37:00

You bloggers are whack.

a massive article and a long debate about another forum - don’t you want to write about something and discuss things that happen in the real world?

turn off your pc and get a life
 
Comment by James Lewitzke
2008-04-13 01:59:08

@Gameover & Andy: Read (or re-read) comment #26.

Also take note on the DATE of this blog post.
 
Comment by mcfox
2008-04-17 13:28:43

I object! Some of Nintendo’s pics are funny.
 
Comment by James Lewitzke
2008-04-17 14:33:46

You may be right about that, mcfox, but you have to admit, the majority of them are just plain disturbing.
 
Comment by mcfox
2008-04-18 02:37:40

lol. His pics are legendary. ;)
 
Comment by noneother
2008-04-20 03:33:18

DP needs to reorganise their forums. At least take the best threads and turn them into static pages.
 
Comment by Sam
2008-04-20 03:43:27

Hahaha you are so wrong people have even made a thread about you : http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=795444
 
Comment by James Lewitzke
2008-04-20 11:45:08
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