Some sort of seniority before you can contact customers?

[Antonia]

The question that comes to my mind is--do the benefits of unrestricted customer contact outweigh the disadvantages? If customers are really getting spammed or stolen away, that seems to me to be a pretty serious disadvantage. I like the idea of a public forum for asking questions about a request. (How would the customers know if there had been a posting? I guess that wouldn't be hard to automate?)

[Constant]

As of right now we have suspended communication for authors that don't have at least one article that has been submitted an approved to the site. This is simply to prevent those members that are here to promote their own business and have no real intention of conforming to the rules of our community. This is meant to benefit not only the customer, preventing them from being overwhelmed by pushy and often inappropriate solicitations, but to protect the hard work of all our authors that are making good use of the rules.

[Debbi]

I wonder if there's any way to discourage spamming these forums. Every day I log on and eagerly look to see if anything new has been posted. Hooray! 10 new postings! Then I take a look and they are all spams:( This has two effects on me, one good and one bad. The good one is that it prompts me to look at topics I might otherwise not have noticed, but the bad one is that I hesitate to look at anything since it could just be an ad for DVDs or something. I'm pretty sure forums are meant to be as open to users as possible since authors and clients may want to ask questions before signing up, but I wish there were some kind of restrictions.......

Debbi

[Celeste Stewart]

It's tough to keep up with the spammers. I try to delete the spam as soon as I see it as does Ed. But when we're offline or otherwise occupied, some sneaks in and stays there until we get to it. In general, if you see a user name of abc1234 or similar, it's a spambot and we'll delete it soon.

[JackieL]

Hi there,
May the "newbie-gods" not strike me down for saying this (because I am a newbie, too) BUT seniority should be rewarded. Although the issue of spam is serious and the reason for this question in the first place, it's not why I have this opinion. Just like in any new "job", it takes time to orient yourself and get a good feel for the process as a whole. There's nothing wrong with requiring newbies to earn their stripes. In the end, it makes the site stronger, and we all need to remember that the reputation of this site is at stake whenever a writer has direct contact with a customer.

That is my two cents for today,
Jackie