Talktourism needs your help!

[john]

Whilst I do not like admitting it :( But Talktourism has gone a little stagnate and stale....

Contributions from spammers from all sorts on backgrounds are on the increase and activity from the intended users: Tourism SME’s and related tourism interested groups primarily from Ireland are on the decrease.

What to do???

The first thing is to stop all the spammers by allowing only genuine interested individuals on the site through moderated access. This is possible, but some new users will have to wait to go through the moderation process. New users would have to show genuine tourism background to become participants on the site...

But what else??? :confused:How can we raise awareness of this resource and motivate others to use this forum. Your HELP and ideas would be appreciated...
Please and thanks
John

[Janet Bennett]

John, its been a rotten couple of years for rural tourism and B&B, and thats probably why we've all dried up a bit. I seem to only log in to have a moan! (see my new moan about Gulliver elsewhere on the forum)

Lets face it, its an uphill struggle competing with better known parts of Ireland, bankrupt hotels on price, added to three rotten summers in a row and a world recession.

Now we have to contend with compulsory registration and grading just when we cant afford to spruce ourselves up. (How come I could find no mention of that as a topic?)

But hey, it cant really get any worse, so the only way is up!

Must admit, so many of the postings now seem irrelevant to this forum I havent been logging in as often, and as you know, I hate that people wont use their real names.

[john]

Jan, I sincerely appreciate your comments and I have taken on board what you have said about forum members in the past and there various hidden names.

Managing the forum takes considerable time and over the last three months the spammers have just been overwhelming. A few weeks ago, I have taken action to ban all those that were blatantly spamming and also mis-using the 'Private Messaging' service from the site by sending spam messages to our members. I have also changed the site from a freely accessible site to all to a FULLY MODERATED SITE. This means that all new members cannot become active on the site until one of the Talktourism team vets their details.

I need to draw up a basic criteria for new members to be allowed to use the site. I am going to look at asking members to provide their web-address as a way for a decision to be reached on allowing them to engage with the forum and other members. The other thing is that all new members will be asked to use a name that represents their tourism business and/or the area that they are from.

We would like to have more genuine tourism enterprises exchanging their views here - be it positive or negative. In the meantime, we continue to improve the forum, remove spam / ban spammers and engage with genuine tourism enterprises.

By the way! Please feel free to commence a new thread about the new B&B registration requirements in Ireland...