[elias]

After carefully evaluating the participation of Ethiopian Review Forum members, as the admin-in-chief I have made the following selection as the best and worst participants. Those who are selected in the best category have helped make this forum the best Ethiopian online discussion forum ever by sharing with us quality topics, valuable information, and well thought out views. The worst are those who kept us busy cleaning their dirt.

Best Forummers

1. Semira
2. Revolutions
3. Aragaw

Worst Forummers

1. Abyssinean (a scumbag, banned permanently)
2. Gamogofa (banned permanently)
3. Balcha Demesse

I encourage moderators to come up with their own best and worst of 2011.

IP ban Awash aka Horn Watch Aka Balcha Demesse

You are hurting your financial bottom line by keeping a deranged lunatic such as Awash. When he posts repetitive non-sense, Google penalizes your forum as spam and sends it further back in the search results, which means fewer and fewer revenue for you.

The best posters here are Revolution, Aragaw and Shalom

Since there are many participants, it would have been better to increase the quota to 'Top 10'. Top three is just not fair enough as there are could be some more. Nonetheless, the top spot should go to none other than revolutions whose contribution is outstanding coupled with quick and timely Photoshop displays of events. He is nightmare of woyane cadres here and beyond. But, I have no complaint with the other mentioned top and worst participants as well.

One more suggestion is that it is easy to identify even from posts of today, one of the worst participants you mentioned was sabotaging the forum by posting irrelevant comments and diversionary posts, in the process burying important timely issues. So if there is no action taken on such kind of people then what is the use of the category 'worst'. If the majority of participants endorsed the worst forum polluters, then it is your task to take action. Otherwise, it is getting boring.

[elias]

You are hurting your financial bottom line...

You think that low of me? If you understand the value of tolerance for opposing views, you would understand why we allow Woyannes, our enemies, to express their views even as they deny our freedom of free speech in our own country.

What is your criterion to catagorize message posters as best or worst ?. Also, why some people are banned though they don't post bad message while others who post nonsense kept on ?. Is there pereferencial treatment here ?.

You are hurting your financial bottom line...

You think that low of me? If you understand the value of tolerance for opposing views, you would understand why we allow Woyannes, our enemies, to express their views even as they deny our freedom of free speech in our own country.

No one is asking you to ban woyannes here. You are not defending free speech by keeping him around, you are defending a troll that will eventually have your website black listed from Google Search results. Spam is spam and once Google crawlers detect this forum has an unusual number of duplicate content, it will put your website in the spam category, which will severely hurt your website and profit margin.

I know what this creep is doing and you may not be aware. Once again, protect your website from spam and IP ban awash aka nostalgia aka horn watch aka Balcha Demesse.

[elias]

One more suggestion is that it is easy to identify even from posts of today, one of the worst participants you mentioned was sabotaging the forum by posting irrelevant comments and diversionary posts, in the process burying important timely issues...

I agree. He has received warnings not to abuse the forum by posting off topic messages on other members' topics. One more instance of abuse and he will be suspended. Just point it out to me as you did today.

[elias]

I know what this creep is doing and you may not be aware. Once again, protect your website from spam and IP ban awash aka nostalgia aka horn watch aka Balcha Demesse.

These are not the same people. And even though Awash is a hardcore Woyanne cadre, he is not disruptive as Balcha.

Spam is spam and once Google crawlers detect this forum has an unusual number of duplicate content, it will put your website in the spam category, which will severely hurt your website and profit margin..

You might be right on that. Recently Ethiopian Review's Google Page Rank was lowered to 5 from 6, and the problem might be the spam posts by the likes of Balcha. http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

that will eventually have your website black listed from Google Search results

Brother Silk,

Your knowledge about search engines and crawlers is so limited. i can see your ignorance quite easily. I see you have little knowledge about how google black lists some sites from its search rankings. it is true that repetitive contents could trigger alarm in google crawls, but i only see AFDist recycling contents not balcha. In the worst case scenario, Elias can explain to google that the content is a user generated content (Forum) and they do enlist back some of the black listed sites through such process. But you have to know that googles algorithm is state of the art to deferentiate forums from other publications. after all that is what make google the dominating search engine in the planet. Just going to the google webmaster page and learn a few point would have helped you from such ignorance. as they say, little knowledge is dangerous.

Elias,

Speaking of google black list, Ethiomedia is in google black list. if you go and search Ethiomedia, you wouldn't get a hit. i just found out a few days ago. Abraha must have done something to trick the algorithm knowingly or unknowingly to get a high ranking on his website.

I will suggest you come up with a better SEO strategy when you have time. I doubt if you are effectively using it now (for silk...SEO means search engine optimization). For instance, i searched "Ethiopian Corruption" in google and ER is 6th/7th on the list behind Nazret. the higher rank goes for a None ethiopian site IRIN NEWS. You can create keywords and phrases like that for ER to be ranked higher on search result. mind you, you have no competition for phrases like "Ethiopian corruption", "Ethiopian Genocide" etc currently as no one is aware of SEO strategies in Ethiopian medias. here is a page that can help on SEO tools :

https://support.google.com/webmasters/b ... swer=35291
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bi ... swer=35769

Additional, if you fear that you will be black listed, you can make the indexer to ignore the forum contents by creating a ROBOT file http://www.seoconsultants.com/robots-text-file/