sham experts

gmakerley · Posted: Wed Jul 15, 2009 8:50 am Post subject: sham experts

something that bothers me lately:

we are getting an awful lot of posts on the variety of forums asking specific questions about (for example) "what is a mortgage" or "how do i apply for a loan" or "what is budget."

almost immediately, the same person who posts such a query is then posting "expert" advice in that same forum or in another. most of that advice is, at best, inane. the rest is for the most part worthless.

is there some sort of game being played that the rest of us know nothing about? are we being played? is it a waste of our time to try to post factual, well-thought-out and well-written pieces of advice to those who (maybe) truly need it?

how can we weed out these imposters? in many cases, it's looking like a money grab. by that, i mean they are merely repeating what a previous poster said (often with the same verbiage) just so they can collect their dime or fifteen cents and cash in once they've accumulated a decent amount. and when i say this, i don't mean to impugn the administrators for how the money is parceled out. hey, after all, they don't have to pay anyone!

okay...this is off my chest, for now. it'll be interesting to see how many respond in agreement, plagiarizing me.

BrianDelaCruz · Posted: Thu Jul 16, 2009 5:55 am Post subject:

Hi George,

You're right. There are some guys in the community who do that quite often. At times you find them asking basic questions on mortgage and at other times, you find them offering 'expert' advice. How come someone who does not know what a mortgage is, provide suggestions and advice of substance to people?

Sometimes it is not easy to distinguish an imposter and an original poster in need of some serious suggestions. The person asking such basic mortgage questions as 'What is a mortgage?' etc., could be someone who really wants to gather some knowledge about mortgage and the various processes involved in it.

However, we do need to keep our forums as free from such imposters as possible. This is a necessity to make sure that real people, desperately seeking ways to get out of their mortgage related problems, receive some quality advice from our members. I'd like to know what other moderators feel about this issue. I also invite suggestions on how we could keep these imposters away from our forums.

Thanks,

Brian Dela Cruz

eric1 · Posted: Thu Jul 16, 2009 7:51 am Post subject:

Guys,

I think that I may have identified the root of ONE of the problems...
Roughly four months ago, one of those culprits sent me a private message asking how they collect the dollars generated by the posts they submit. This individual was thinking that posting here is like money in the bank.

I agree that there are those who ask elementary questions and then post advice to others which often not only makes no sense from a mortgage perspective, but also makes no grammatical sense. Lots of broken English lately.

Finally, we are still getting spammed by Mortgage Man X. One suggestion would be to allow for a filter which would prevent posts with certain words. For example, many forums are able to filter out profanity. We could add his e-mail address as an unauthorized word which would prevent him from posting it here on the forum.

eric1 · Posted: Thu Jul 16, 2009 8:21 am Post subject:

A pefect example of what I am talking about is Realgeni. This guy is not in the business. He joined this forum about three months after me and he has about 200 more posts than I do.....why?

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