Chile Forum

Personally I see both sides of this issue,(I found the link rather helpfull and had saved it before you removed it)
However maby "a little trigger happy" might be a good thing given all the spam c%#p out there but perhaps next time take linky down temporarly till spam issue can be verified by Pm etc.
Just my 0.02cents
Either way I find this site very helpfull and I'm sure the "wrinkels" will iorn themselfs out. After all it's only been only a year (almost) in existance.
Good luck with it..............

Thank you very much Charles for looking into this openly and sorting things out publicly. Your apology is welcome but I knew your intent, and your heart is in the right place in protecting this community you built here. This little incident is settled for me and I appreciate you cleared my name. We deal with spam on our sites ourselves and it's an incredible nuisance. It's so bad comments are broken on my personal blog because of a constant barrage of automated spam, and I haven't had the time to upgrade my blog software with better spam filters.

Just a suggestion next time you're in doubt: you may turn the hotlink off but leave it as text, so it has no SEO value but the text can be copied by other members, provided the link is indeed relevant of course. Just a thought.

I think it would be useful to make sure we're all on the same page in terms of how to link to what, not only on the forum but also on the wiki. For people who don't follow the internet's inside baseball closely, it recently surfaced that employees in big companies and governments have been stealthily editing Wikipedia (which I'm sure everyone knows) to portray their organizations in a better light. Tactics known as "astroturfing" (pretending you're grassroots) are sadly too common, so Charles is not just paranoid here, because there are really people out there to get us (i.e. online communities from blogs to forums to wikis)!

I think the admin's policy to get to know people on the forum before they're allowed to post on the wiki makes sense. Total strangers are unlikely to contribute to a narrow topic such as "Chile for gringos" anyway. Wikipedia had to change their policies from the early anything-goes days to limit bias and political turf wars on sensitive issues or commercial spam. On the other hand, the kind of embedded link I used (where the link is part of the narrative) tends to flow better and makes for easier reading, so there's something to be said for a linking policy that's a bit more flexible than the current one, at least on the wiki where some pages will be more valuable if they embed plenty of links. I know I'm bookmarking like there's no tomorrow to make our relocation easier (you know, where to get free WiFi, rent a car, and three dozen other things necessary to keep things as smooth as possible).

I'm curious what others think is a useful and valuable link and whether the way they're formatted matters. For me, digging out something that might be in Spanish is quite valuable, because I'm unlikely to find it through Google queries in English. Recent example in the forum: we've been talking about Movistar's mobile internet plans. To me, that's the kind of practical issue worth an explicit deep link (i.e. link to a specific page that describes what it is). You guys might well have different expectations about links, or maybe don't care either way.

Well I moot it all gets resolved with an arm-wrestle. Best of three. Loser buys a round...

i know it's off the topic but i guess this place is as good for jump in as any other. i hope i didn't overlooked the topic where introductions should be done.

by some accident i crashed into chile (only on web) few weeks ago and i quikly decided that that is i should try. may be just because of my insanity or lack of understanding all the rational advice on this forum but at this forum my only interest is to start living on chiloe. well, should wait for my house to sale first:(

by the way: if anyone over there is interested in beautiful house on the other side of the world;)

this suppose to be a forum for people who know at leat something about chile and i don't now anything. so i'll rather "listen" till chiloe...

i'm not a native english speaker but i guess you will not mind:)

and to admin, congratiulations on professionalism on very high level

i suppose this is what i need to do to count?

Slightly off topic, but also on topic, these spam writers come in and try to make these stupid forum links. They still haven't realized that Google has caught on to it and they discount links in a forum.

I have a teaching forum and we have had only two instances of spamming where someone tries to make a post. They are easy to discover. I usually just take out the links if the post is coherent.

That's why I use SMF, default out of the box, it's the most secure forum software out there...and it's free. You might like the default rss feeds they have for every room. And no I have no interested in SMF, I just like the software.