I was visiting DN Forum yesterday, and I decided to look through some of the earliest posts on the forum. While clicking through to some of the earliest sales posts, I was surprised when I came across the posts of a couple people I know who listed domain names for sale. These people no longer actively sell domain names, so it was a bit strange to see their sale posts.
Seeing these old posts got me thinking that domain investors should be mindful of public posts they made, even if they were made many years ago. Some of us have changed business strategies and shifted focus over the years, but there may be an archive of our earlier activities on forums and even domain blog comment sections.
Although most sales posts would likely be innocuous, especially if the name(s) were sold and/or prices were edited out, but there may be other issues to keep in mind. I am sure most of us have lost our cool before, and perhaps we got in the middle of a heated or contentious discussion. I assume most of us have published things we wish we hadn’t, and some of those things may look bad in today’s light.
At some point in the future, there may be a time where someone does a bit of a background check on you. This could be because of a new job opportunity or perhaps even a large domain name or company sale. Whatever the case may be, you wouldn’t want something you published on a forum to come back and haunt you now or in the future. It’s important to do an inventory of your public activities every once in a while. Yes, in a perfect world, you wouldn’t have written something objectionable or listed that grey-area domain name for sale, but we’ve all made mistakes and hopefully learned from them.
I believe most forums allow you to edit your own posts (not usually post titles), so it might be a good idea to see if there’s something you would want to have edited. I wrote about closing old sales threads, and you might want to consider editing posts that might make you look bad.
For years members have asked for the ability to delete their own sales posts and for years the idea has been rejected. It’s all about ranking high in Google and racking up the numbers, Show as many sales posts and members as you possibly can for the benefit of making the forum appear it’s the biggest and most popular on the planet. If you look under fixed prices they show 303,746 sales posts, where over 303,000 are for the most part DEAD, They serve NO purpose other than making the forum look bigger than it actually is.
It’s the same with memberships, they boast over 100,000 members, what they don’t tell you is whether or not those members are active, non active or both, The last time I looked the number was less than 150 active members, I tried once to terminate my account and was surprised at the backlash response I got from administrators, that you just CANT do, we can ban you but your still counted in the 100,000+
The number of active members can easily be measured by how active the discussions are, this will give you a good idea of how popular the forum actually is.