State of Steepster
I know if I’M hitting the ‘mark as spammer’ button dozens of times a day, it is certainly a ton of work and a ton of work for other people. So if Steepster is too much work for the moderators, I think one of those $30 spam catchers would help a ton of people have way less work, including the moderators. Which would create more time for other things and give the moderators (and all of us) more of a break? I have no idea how Steepster has gone on this long without one of the spam catchers. I’m probably hitting the mark as spam button on legitimate new Steepster users at this point, but I try to give the benefit of the doubt on not obvious spammers.
So basically the users who are sticking around an unresponsive Steepster are doing a lot of spam fighting which is sad. We are trying!
I have no sympathy anymore. I asked to help with the spam. I got an e-mail with the “rules” on it, replied to it saying I would follow them, and the admin still could not be bothered to switch my account over so I’d have the permissions to help delete spam. At this point, I feel they just don’t care, and that is why I no longer report spam. I tried to help, feel turned down, and that was that. They can have their dirtied up site if they don’t want to impliment first-hand tactics when many of us have offered monetary compensation to make it happen, and then there are those of us offering to help front-line and they won’t even switch our accounts over.
I know, Mastress Alita. :( I really don’t want you to worry about the spam because you weren’t given the spam powers. It must be irritating enough. I at least have those, so I try to do what I can.
Is it possible for those with more experience to start a new group like Steepster? I can’t figure out why the Admin just doesn’t care. There are so many here that love the format of Steepster and leaving tea reviews.
It would be hard to replicate Steepster IMO. The sheer number of tea reviews alone make it unique. RateTea.com is the only other site like it that I’m aware of and it doesn’t even come close. I just wish the Admins would hurry up sell Steepster already to someone who cares.
I don’t read all of these threads like I should because to be honest, I just have too many things to do and not enough time to do everything so something somewhere has to give. I would rather dedicate what time that I do have to reading the tasting notes that others post about my teas so that I can hopefully glean some useful criticism and create the best teas possible – so that I know what works for people and what doesn’t. So if you guys have another place where you do post/chat – or find another place – please someone PM me so that I know where to go for the valuable input that I get here.
It probably was mentioned in passing here and scanning through I didn’t catch it but these sites and forums seem to have a natural lifespan, and this one and Tea Chat seemed to reach theirs, with Facebook groups taking over. The spam issue does make things much worse here, filtering past 9/10ths of all recent posts being that, not to mention Mei Leaf. I’m more active in the r/tea subforum in Reddit now but it’s not at all the same thing. That’s mostly just people new to tea posting pictures, and the occasional tea haul photo, or more rarely a question. The review database makes this different than all the rest but it’s hard to keep people interested in populating that as had been the case.
Would it help things at all to “promote” Steepster a bit? I don’t do reddit, but what if those who do mentioned Steepster there and other places. If more peopke were active and joining, perhaps things would improve?
That would help if the site were being actively maintained. But sadly it has fallen into a state of neglect and it will be hard to attract new users until the admins clean things up.
I’ve started posting on Teaforum.org which helps fill some of the void left by Steepster, but I would like to see the discussion board revived here and some of the bugs fixed.
That’s sort of how I feel right now too. Trying to “promote” Steepster as it is right now feels like those shady real estate agents that wax poetic about a dumpster of a house. The “foundation” of the site is breaking apart and no one will “repair” it, it is over run with an “infestation of spam”, yet just overlook that it is falling apart, overrun with bugs and spam, because the roommates and neighborhood are great! I don’t want to promote a site like that, honestly. Sure, I love the people here, but the PMs are now unusable for me because of the 503 errors, sometimes I can’t even log in because of those errors, many members are unable to post on these very message boards because of the 503 errors (which, by the way, is likely way these boards are ghosting so bad, in addition to the spam problem), the site is overrun with the spam and no one is willing to put in frontline spam protection despite the active community willing to pay cash to have it done… unless these problems are addressed (which, despite this thread being up for months, no one has bothered to address a single concern from the community) I cannot in my right mind “recommend” Steepster or “promote” it to anyone right now.
A great way to put it, Mastress Alita… on the bright side, maybe the spammers also can’t post to the message boards???
The owner of steepster wants us to leave. So I listen him and left. I’m on the teaforum.org as well now. It is clean, well organized and admins are active! Hope they will make tasting DB soon and other possible futures used for tea lovers.
Good Bye!
I’m basically about to call it quits here since I cannot consistently post comments.
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