Real Estate Agent, Brokerage and Mortgage Blogs

Interesting way to get hits and attribute them to the real estate site.  Now had I taken the challenge that would have been one unfair competition that the Tomato tried to set up over on ActiveRain.  Luckily I don't need to prove mine.  The leads that are flowing in are all I need. 

Isn't promoting TEEN PORN a criminal offense???

This is shocking - thank you for bringing it to our attention - I would be mortified and feel very violated if this were my website. A great reminder that we must "manage" our blogs like any other part of your business - you can't just put it on auto-pilot., especially since our name's attached to it!    

That's just plain disturbing - and you do question ethics, tactics and just plain morals.  Thanks for bringing it to the light Mary.

Brian,

I am chosing to believe that she didn't know this was going on as well and that is why I did not use her name in the post.  I believe this is an attempt by the blogging company to boost traffic artificially or just plain bad judgement on the part of the web company. Forums can easily be spam proofed and can add value to a site- the fact that this comapny did not spam proof this forum or place certain strictures on it is proof that they are novices at web development and know very little about the open source products they use.  I feel for the site owner, but it is a valuable lesson for others of the dangers of hiring the wrong developer.

Oh My!

This comment may not see "the light of day", but I feel compelled to write it.

Is this post really an attempt to, "save one Realtor or Mortgage Broker from this type of black hat SEO, a ban from Google or, worse yet, a criminal lawsuit" or is it just an attempt to discredit the blogging company -- one of your competitors -- and one who you obvioulsy have had a beef with in the past? If not for the "disclaimer" in your comment, it appears to also have the intent  of discrediting the blogger herself, and for that you should be ashamed of yourself.

You say in a comment, "...that is why I did not use her name in the post". Come on Mary, at least give your readers a little credit for having some semblance of intelligence. We don't need a NAME when were have SCREEN SHOTS and LINKS to the domain. For Pete's sake, you might as well have just put the bloggers name in a scrolling marquee across the top of the page. Make it flash in bright primary colors while you're at it.

You're entitled to believe what you want about the provider. I "know" the blogger, and I "know" the provider and I don't believe for a second this was intentionally done by either of them. Of course I thought I "knew" you too and I didn't think you would stoop so low as to call out someone in the blog world in such a public fashion. I'm just curious, did you bother to pick up the phone or send a private email before you accused these people and skewered them publically?

Personally, I grow weary of your little spat with Jim. There's plenty of room for both of you in the blogiverse.

Jay,

Unlike other blog owners, I don't censor my comments unless they are spam.  You have a right to your opinion and I respect it.  I have no intention of attacking the blog owner, but at the very least this post has now made them take that forum down and has possibly saved her from getting banned.  As far as stooping low, I didn't see anyone rushing to Laurie's defense when she was attacked by Jim and Greg or RSS Pieces when Jim attackes us in post after post.  I have only ever posted two (this being one) negative posts about Jim, he on the other hand posts thinly veiled attacks at us and our clients regularly.  This post isn't low, this is fact. 

My "spat" with Jim is a lawsuit in Florida's federal court that anyone can track.  It is about copyright infringement, not this.  I would have brought this matter to the entire blogosphere, no matter who the blogger, no matter who the blog company.  Forums are simply a bad idea if you don't know how to spam proof them. 

Forums are a great way to bring visitors back to your website, promote your company and events, provide feedback to user, etc.  It is commonly used all over the internet for such reasons. However, when left without moderation and monitoring is like leaving your keys in the ignition.  You are bound to have your car stolen. 

Your more popular open source and paid bulletin boards (phpbb, vb) have filters than can be applied, as well as many other security features that prevent such a thing from happening.  This is something that the developer should have known and passed along to the client.  Not doing so is very bad practice on the developers end.

"As far as stooping low, I didn't see anyone rushing to Laurie's defense when she was attacked by Jim and Greg. "

Me, to Laurie, on Greg's blog: "Congrats on your success!"

Greg himself, to Laurie, on Greg's blog: "Laurie Manny has essentially been caught in a crossfire, so I should add that I wish her nothing but success with her weblog."

I won't waste the space quoting John McKnight's attack on Greg, posted by Laurie.

Not intending to get into a pissing match here, but don't say no one came to Laurie's defense. Several did.

"I have no intention of attacking the blog owner"

Then why not say so in the post, instead of relegating that to a comment?  As you well know, many blog readers never see  comments. Why not share your knowledge and explain HOW we can avoid spambots and such? The post reads to me like an attack on Roberta and Jim, nothing more. But that's just my opinion.

"Unlike other blog owners, I don't censor my comments unless they are spam."

Really? Just curious, did Jim respond to the post in a spammy way?

Jay,

Jim never commented on this post. 

Thank you for your support of Laurie, I was not aware of it.

Athol,

You were an exception to the rule.  Thank you fo your support of Laurie as well.

There are solutions to forum related issues and the first is making sure that you are working with a company that actually knows the Internet and knows technology.  We have spent a great deal of time developing our platform and making sure that what you saw in this post doesn't happen to our clients. 

Whether you are using our product or not, you can always come to RSS Pieces to get advice on any blog or web related issues.

A good forum to use is phpBB and their own forums recommend how to reduce the impact of spam. 

www.phpbb.com

www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php

In response to David Adorno's post.

By looking at the images you can easily tell that the forum was a phpBB forum. Spam bots are a huge problem in a community only if you don't bother to attempt to fix it before it happens. PhpBB has plenty of Mods out there that resolve this issue, there's this lovely tool out there... its called SEARCH. I have ran a phpBB community for a few years and i haven't had any spam problems since i started. I have only 1 spam protection mod on my forum, it's a simple registration mod. it also helps to turn off guest posting. The problem with the so called "developers" who put the forum up obviously had no clue to what they were doing, which i find to be sad because it is basic knowledge about spam bots. There was no attempt to even try to prevent it, if they spent the extra 5 mins to do the search and install a mod then this would not be an issue.

In response to Jay Thompson.

I understand that you don't think this was done intentionally. The point is, the "provider" knew that the forum was going up and all they did was, and i quote, "We simply linked it up to the text link that says Forum"... Not sure how you feel but if my provider didn't care enough about to inform me that there needs to be spam protection in place, forums are known to get hit by spambots, then it's about time to move to a "provider" that cares. This is a sign of laziness and ignorance on the "providers" part. It is their duty to ensure that the site is going to be safe, secure and as spam free as possible. Makes you feel bad for the site owner that the "provider" just didn't care to give a hint of advice.

Wow! Who could have thought! I suppose the world of blogging mirrors the rest of the world. There are the Goods and the Bads... Hopefully I will manage to keep myself among the Good.

I am very new to blogging and SEO. I am reading and learning every day. I must thank you Mary for leading the way.

There is another leader I want to thank... Laurie Manny. In this world there are takers and givers.  Laurie Manny is a giver. In the few months I have known Laurie, I came to appreciate and benefit not only from her expertise but her sense of ethics. I always thought ethics was my middle name but Laurie helped me redefine that word. Thank you Laurie and best wishes for continued success.

Now I must go and found out what to do with the four raucous raccoons that appeared in my Long Beach backyard last night. 2 blocks from the beach with no parks around, where did these guys come from?

Mary, Hats off to you and your hard work to educate and promote responsible blogging. We support you efforts 100%.

We are fortunate to know you and to be clients of yours

Yes Teresa, I am sure this post is indeed generating a lot of traffic and it's sad because it tells you a little something about the society in which we live and that is... we enjoy a good fight.

Jay... I am also sick of seeing the two sites fighting and it appears almost to be one sided at the moment.

As for the ugliness of this little fight between the two sites, it's about as ugly as farting in church and blaming it on the preacher.

Marc: Sorry to hear about Google and your linking strategyu. I was one of the few who tried to trade links with you but got refused as my new link exchange was only a few days old and you refused to trade links with anyone whose pages had yet to be indexed.  I have since gotten rid of that link exchange so no harm done there. You are partly to blame for getting me into blogging through as I tried hard to copy your site but ended up going my own ways so I owe you a thank you somewhere in there :-)

Jay,

You are certainly entitled to your opinion and I respect you for coming here and voicing it.  I had a long reply in mind for this but instead have chosen to say that we welcome your comments and that I personally would speak to you or anyone else on this topic and others.  Our reason for being here is to provide a solution for the industry that works well and is safe and along the way we will try to help people by offering free training and advice.  That said, the post only appeared to be directed at certain people but is instead meant to be a cautionary tale to bloggers. 

Opensource is good, it can even be safe but don't risk the reputation that you have built by following bad or dangerous advice.  The forum in question could have been secured in a matter of minutes when it was first installed and this all could have been a non-issue.  If anyone wants a forum that is safe, let us know and we will help you select a free product that works and guide you through the install.  Our tech support personnel will forward you to one of our team that can help you add this functionality and help you through the social minefield.  And yes, our help will be free. 

Give a man a fish....

John

I had installed phpBB on my site a few months ago. I also installed the askimet plugin to the bulletin board. Spam continued to get through. I even set the thing so that you had to register and be approved by an adminstator in order for your post to show up on the site and spam continued to get through.

As for hits, I am inactive. Yes I have a real estate license but I blog for fun and as you can see on my blog, I blog about a little bit of everything. Hits do not mean anything to me, nor does comments. I blog to learn and expand my own knowledge.

Going back to hits, I am a former spammer, I can drive traffic to my site if I wish. I started spamming people when I was 13 years old and had no clue what I was doing on the net. I am now far removed from those days as I realized what I was doing was wrong but still I can drive traffic to my site if I wish a I still have some tricks up my sleeves.

Back from a busy day finally....

It seems like Roberta started a forum and then paid it no attention and had it get infested with "after hours" stuff.

I have a Tomato Blog set up and have never had editorial oversight from Jim Cronin. The day he calls me and says I can't run something is the day I look for a new host. That being said I personally have no problem with adult sites (properly run of course) but wouldn't think for a minute I could run one on Jim's servers.

It seems to be a big embrassing mess for Roberta more than anything. I do think Mary you are right in princple, but also getting some mileage out of this you didn't need to.

Agree that Jay was also giving congrats to Laurie on her success, but disagree that Greg was positive towards her. The first post about her blog Greg ran called her and Brian's efforts a fake weblog and compared it to a cheap sex toy in terms of it's abliity to satisfy.

It is all in all, getting rather tiresome on the RE.net.

2006 is so over.

I too am a fellow tomato graduate, and I cannot believe for one second that this was intentional by them.  I worked with them for many, many hours over 4 or 5 months and not once did they ever suggest anything even remotely spammy, much less obscene.  Quite the opposite, they stress openness, friendliness, and honesty as hallmarks of good bloggers.  I debated whether or not to even dignify this with a response, so I hope I did not add to the bonfire of these "witches." 

There is enough mean spirited tension out in the real world.  Why should I choose to visit a blog with it, too? 

Adieu.

Brian,

Thanks for the support.  I knew this post would raise some ire and people would think it was mean spirited because of my known issues with the company behind it, but I also felt strongly that this was something people needed to be aware of and see first hand, since this type of forum implementation will cause a site to get banned and could open a Realtor up to far worse. 

I would have done this regardless of whom the blog owner or the blog company behind it.  I know that Blogging Systems implements forums for their clients but does it quite responsibly, so there are plenty of companies out there that are competent and do things in the best interest of their clients.

-Mary

I used to have a PHPbb forum on lenderama.com. It was to help create a community of LO's and had nothing to do with driving traffic. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but the spammers were to much. Adding a few filters is not enough. I tried them all (the filters, the visualizer, everything). Eventually, I set up the forum so that I had to personally approve every new member registration. That didn't work either as the spammers set up robots to add thousands of members a day. I couldn't sort through them to see who was real.

My point is that forum could of been set up with the best of intentions, and without any idea of how time consumer it could be to make it work. The real target of everyone's fury should be the jerk-o spammers who do this in the first place.

Unbelievable.  The Realtor responsible should be ashamed of himself.  Are they so ignorant that they did not follow the COPA standard for protecting children from online sexually explicit content? Simply irresponsible use of forums and the Internet as a whole.

I am sickened by the actions of this Realtor and am thankful that someone called them out on their actions.

Jeremy, If you have no issues with spam, that's great for you. Maybe because my forum was highly ranked for one of the most lucretive keywords on Earth (mortgage) made me a bigger target. I tried at least a dozen different mods to prevent spam.

None of it worked because appearently, my forum was worth registering for by hand.

Once I set up personal review for every new registration, the spam stopped, but the spammers set up a robot that created so many new fake users, is was impossible to weed through them to find real registrations. The VIP mod you linked would have been helpful, but like I said, some spammers actually took the time to register by hand. They were relentless. I finally had to shut it down despite a high a lot of work to the contrary.

--------

If some punk spray paints the F-word on the side of your building, it might be your responsibility to clean it in a timely manner, but merely providing a blank wall is not a crime, nor an ivitation for grafitti. That's basically what happened here. Everyone who has critisized Roberta doesn't have a clue as to the verasity of what spammers are capable of. One day you have a nice freindly forum. The next, it's choke full of the worst imaginable smut.

Using forums and not tightening down on that type of behavior is incredibly bad for everyone involved. The ultimate question being whether or not the real estate pro was actually cognescent of the tactic or if they were blindly being steam-rolled by traffic numbers that didn't make sense to them.

Trying to stay ahead of the spammers is incredibly difficult, and possibly even painful when it comes to forums. However if a true community of thoughts and ideas is shared, it becomes worth the effort as a marketing channel.