I have to say, I find that Sitepoint is a great place for resources. And the greatest resource on the internet is a forum. To be honest, Ive always found the layout of these forums, too intense and heavy, slow, and has been a major deterrant from me being active.
To hear that your moving to vBulletin is great news. Simplicity is key!
Thank you very much Sarah for e-mail me. I was in a little vacancy and I’m right back ! SitePoint is very important to me because is very friendly and welcoming 
^^^ gasp good lord, chris turn!
Just keep the good job
Thanks for the email Sarah
I have been busy since about 2006 and even with a economic slowdown, I’m still as busy as ever. :irock:
I must admit I got a bit frustrated with this forum as I kept trying to upload my avator image and couldn’t despite having made 25 posts, but I have just found that I now can.
I am a bit of a wanderer but I do read the forum posts sometimes but don’t always contribute. That is a bit of a confidence thing I’m afraid. 
I do hope to look on here more as it is relevant to me.
I don’t come to Sitepoint forums often as I only visit when in difficulties and that is not often as I am a pretty ace web developer. But when I do visit I usually get told the answer to a gritty problem by a friendly if anonymous person.
Can you tell me something please? How can I become anonymous? I am using my own name as my username as I think I have nothing to hide, but I have now discovered that there are ways of searching out these posts I have made and they make it look as though I do not know everything there is to know. Not good for customers’ eyes. How can I change my username? I cannot just open a new account as the system says that email address is taken.
Hello all:
SP has always seemed a good resource and community, I just never found the time to really establish a foothold in the community here. Sometimes, large communities can seem a bit impenetrable at times.
Generally, I hang out in a small forum community some friends and I administrate. Aside from that, I like participating on Usenet (comp.lang.php and comp.lang.c). However, I’ll try checking out the SP forums again.
Thanks for the email, HAWK, I have no doubt the community will continue to prosper under your tyrannyguidance.
don’t worry about this type of customer
you said you are already an ace developer, so being an active forum participant is actually a plus – it shows that you are willing to keep learning and continuously improve your skills
of course, you will look even better if you answer questions as well as ask them
oh boy, I haven’t been active in a long time! Most of the reasons are personal, like I got very busy once I got a programming gig, and as others said can get my programming answers from google. But I also turned to google as there was a long period where the search here was just broken and it would run for minutes per query. I also asked to change my username over 2 years ago I think? I read it would take awhile, but come on… 
I agree with the user that sub forums on bigger picture considerations like application design would be good for stimulating talk. Also interviews with names from the industry can be fun.
@dvharrison, don’t be shy, just post! I used to feel that way too, but you may be asking something someone else was wondering as well, or be holding back on info that could be useful. The more you do it, the easier it will get!
Firstly I echo hcamelion almost totally.
I also agree that something like the stackoverflow vote system would be a good idea, as then, for something like this, I simply could have adequately responded with just 1 click rather than a dull reply echoing the sentiment of others.
Behind the scenes we’ve been working super hard to eliminate
the spammers and fluff posters, and now we’re focusing on the
raising the quality of posts.
When’s this activity going to turn to fluff poster central, the content writing forum?
Most are article scraper or one dimensional SEO-only posts specifically about writing avoidance in its many forms.
Displaying one’s true name helps honest people
As r937, I think this is good. When customers are worried about a provider, they prefer the one who tells he ignores something and learns about it, over the ones who hide something or even who say anything so to posture as knowledgeable.
Again I think that, as an honest person, you better hide nothing, thus you keep your true name displayed.
BTW I appear, everywhere and as far as possible (e.g. in Google and YouTube, my name being used, I had to take another, Merlin1940), under my true name, Michel Merlin.
Versailles, Tue 16 Mar 2010 13:45:25 +0100
I really enjoy visiting SitePoint and over the years I have learned so many things. I considered myself a newbie, because I always feel that there are still tons to learn.
About this forum specifically, I may not contribute much, and there have been some big gaps in my visits occassionaly - mainly because of too much work, but I do visit it quite often, daily or weekly.
Personally I think that techy forums are a good way to learn what’s the latest buzz about a new “thing”, to see what other gurus say about it, and that’s something I find in SitePoint.
However I have to agree with the rest about “one word-or whatever” posts. I’ve been visiting the seo section a lot lately and I find it very annoying when I read a promising title of a thread, only to discover that it has so many meaningless posts just for increasing post counts, or as part of some people’s SEO strategy.
I know quite a few things to create my own opinions but I always enjoy reading and most importantly learning more things.
But nevertheless, I will not stop visiting SitePoint. I got stuck here from the first visit
I wish you the best of luck with your efforts here.
You’ve identified a major issue here, of people posting just to spread their signature.
In addition to too many fluff posters, I find myself often at a loss when I need real answers because of the lack of real posters which is a related, but separate problem. I think perhaps combining some of the less active subforums would help.
The StackOverflow format does seem to have been proven to work better for Q&A than the forum format, so maybe keep “questions” and “discussions” separate. Instead of having 50 subforums to post questions in, have one button: “Ask a Question” – it’ll take you to a screen in which you choose the tags for your question, ask it, and get answers from people watching those tags (just like StackOverflow). The bells and whistles (like badges and points), plus the easier access, would probably attract higher quality answers than the current forum-based format.
I find the CSS forum the best in the net. I only wish i could have more time to participate in that forum but one day i will…
Whenever I need web / tech help, SitePoint is my first choice.
I think it’s great that you’ve cleaned up SPAM and FLUFF, but what about RUDE replies?
90% of the help I get is very knowledgeable, and very polite and professional.
But, every once in a while there seems to be heckling or rude behavior, that is inappropriate and more importantly wasteful and a distraction from the discussion at hand.
Of course, I’m not talking about harassment or discrimination which should of course always be reported, I simply mean rude and unnecessary comments along the lines of;
“This thread is stupid.”
And that being all the thread benefits from that user. Besides the fact that it’s just inappropriate, it’s not helpful in any way to anyone and is just a waste of SitePoint’s purpose and doesn’t help the community.
Thanks for listening, Bryan
Three years ago I taught myself web design. I have bought several SP books which have been very valuable, but the forum has been a life saver on numerous occasions. Web design is a part time activity for me so when a request for something I don’t know how to do cropps up from a client, I turn to SP forums first and I have always had lots of responses from people, who help me go in the right direction. recently I needed to someting that I didn’t even know what to call it. It turned out to be disjointed rollovers. Anyway that headed me in the right direction and I found the CSS markup I needed to do the job. Thanks to all the ecxperts who read the posts and respond to users like me who don’t know it all but want to. thanks. Susan
I have a lot of love for sitepoint, I have always received good and useful information.
I would like to see some more directed forum groups, jQuery, CMS’s, HTML 5 and CSS 3
What is it that you want from us?
What I wanted from sitepoint a LONG time ago, was for the moderators to keep the forum clean.
But instead, everyone was punished because of a few people posting trash. People were spamming the forum to build up post count, and build up signature links. Instead of stopping the trash post, the admin just disabled guest viewing of signature links.
Its not “just” the signature links, its also the massive amount of trash that gets posted on this forum. Its like every other post is along the lines of “thanks for the tip”.
When innocent people are punished because of the actions of others, something is wrong. I felt that I was being punished because the moderators were unable to do their job. Why punish me, because your not able to stop the trash post?
As a forum admin, I know how difficult it is to run an active forum. Regardless of size, you have to have the people in place to do the job. My forum stats at 3 years old - Threads: 97,343, Posts: 1,393,196, Members: 29,664, Active Members: 6,779.
Due to the low quality post spammers, lack of actions by the moderators, this site has gone downhill big time. I have stopped posting here, because I felt that the moderators either did not care about the quality of this community, or did not know “how” to improve it.
My suggestions:
Create a forum section where members can only see the thread they create. Configure the reported post settings, so that when someone reports a post, a new thread is created in the private section. Then the member and the moderator can discuss “why” the thread was reported and what to do about it.
Let search engines index my signature - because I have not done anything wrong.
Maybe install the “thanks” modification from vbulletin.org. Someone post a “Thanks for the tip” reply, send them an infraction and tell them to use the “Thanks” system.
I always liked Sitepoint. I haven’t been back for the simple reason that you made all the signatures no - follow. I spend time in the forums for enjoyment but also for link building. I think you are losing a lot of your visitors for this fact.