There is good news, and there is bad news.
The bad news is, all the posts will go away. If you have favorite threads, or valuable info you come back to, I suggest you go and capture it now.
The good news is, the new forums are set up in such a way as to facilitate only good, legitimate posters who sincerely need help or want to join the community. We invite you to go there and start some threads -- either asking questions or starting discussions. It will be a while before others join you -- but eventually, they will come.
Since moving to the web in 1994, DT&G maintained two email listservs called "The Design Cafe" and "Web Design & Review" as a means for DTG readers to discuss all facets of the design, graphic arts and communication arts fields. We were actually the first "Design Cafe" online.
In 2005 the lists became so inundated with spammers and cyber-crooks it became overwhelming and kept crashing the server. So, we shut those down and went to great expense to purchase, build and deploy the www.dtg-forums.com site using vBulletin. The forums were a success to a certain extent, and incorporated Photoshop 911 along with Web Design and Review.
Over the past four years, the rate of forum-bots and cyber-crooks has once again overtaken legitimate registrations and posters. It has been somewhat easier to administrate, since vBulletin has built-in IP address blocking.
Each day our staff would spend an hour or so cleaning out the riff-raff, cyber-crooks and link-creeps looking only to profit by getting their links on the site. The site has been under a relentless attack by forum-bots trying to get ads and links posted. Each new level of captcha has been breached by the bots. We've blocked most of China, Turkey, Russia, Romania, Brazil and other sources of these creeps and bots, ending up with a list of over 300 major ISP IP blocks and countless thousands of banned email addresses.
It just isn't right for us to go to the time and expense to support a discussion facility that costs too much, brings in no revenue, but causes such a bleed on resources. Yes, there are lots of other forums online that continue in spite of such challenges. They either aren't high enough on the food chain to bother, don't care, and let the riff-raff have free run, or their revenue is sufficient to compensate them for the trouble. Even "groups" at Yahoo and Google are now becoming primarily spam sites, and it was recently estimated that 88% of the blogs at Blogger.com are stalker or spammer sites. We decided it just isn't worth it.
For your information...
- The Record number of forum users at the same time: 233 on August 30, 2009
- The Top poster was tscreative with 456 posts
- The most replied to thread was Qwasian/TeamBrinkz.com
- The most viewed thread was "Redesign complete, what do you think now?
- The most popular forum was "Web Critique"
- Posting Statistics (click for chart)
- Registration Statistics (click for chart)
With just over 4,000 legitimate subscribers to the forums, a lot of help was purveyed to a lot of web users. The good discussions were excellent, and even we learned a lot.
We're hoping this kind of high quality exchange continues in our new location, and we hope the bots and spammers will find the registration and posting regimen too much trouble to bother us. We may be wrong, but we'll see. Unfortunately a lot of legitimate users will be lost in the move. Many others will see it's too much trouble to continue participating. We're sorry for that.
Thanks for reading
Don't forget ... we encourage you to share your discoveries about favorite or famous graphic designers and illustrators with other readers. Just comment below, join the forums for discussion, or give me a tweet at Twitter/DTG_Magazine
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