zcommodore

I've had enough.  I'm quitting Prospers.org.

I'm sick of the drama.  I'm sick of the drama queens.  I'm sick of the negativity.  I'm sick of the trolls. I've had enough of it so I'm just going to walk away.

I'm sick of Bama's constant trolling, negativity, disrespect, and a general lack of decency towards almost everyone.  Posting with multiple screennames was the last straw. Bama, you need to get a life!  Bama keeps threatening to leave but keeps coming back and I'm sick of that too.

I'm sick of JustinZachary/BFS who is nothing but an attention whore who seems to want nothing more than to call the female members on .org names.  He then wonders why no one likes him.  He promised to leave months ago but keeps coming back and I'm sick of it.

I'm sick of Eagles fan teakins2002 trolling for trouble.  He also promised to leave but he keeps coming back.  Just leave already!

I'm sick of the drama queens like Ira01 and MtnChick and others who make mountains out of every tiny molehill on Prosper.  You've said repeatedly that you're pulling out of Prosper, so why don't you leave?

A week ago, I decided I'd had enough and thought I'd take a week off, so I did.  Now that the week is over, I still can't stand it so I'm done.  Bye!

Oh, and one more thing...

APRIL FOOLS!

Seriously, I did take a week off because I was getting tired of the drama. I did have one experience while I was "gone" that illustrated why I don't think I'll completely leave though.  I saw a blog post by Jeff on his MyLendingClub blog that was almost completely wrong.  The post said that Prosper didn't pay interest on the money they incorrectly witheld from group leaders and lenders.  I posted a comment pointing out the facts in reply and I got an e-mail from him asking for where Prosper had said they were paying interest so I sent him a link.  He also complained because he thought only .org people knew these things.  After I replied, he deleted his blog post (and my comment of course - you can still find part of it on p2pnobank if you look for it).  The fact that he didn't know this illustrated to me the fact that, even with it's flaws, .org does have value in keeping track of what's going on at Prosper.  The best part is that I can "ignore" people I get tired of reading. :-)

WARNING: Apparently, according to Prosper, the website that hosts this blog is out to steal your identity.  Reading, posting or having anything to do with Prospers.org should be done at your own risk.  Don't say you weren't warned.

Since the removal of the Prosper spreebb forums and then the subsequent addition of a fully-moderated set, Prospers.org has seen a huge increase in traffic according to the Prospers.org stats page.  Then, last weekend, when Prosper went through and deleted every mention of Prospers.org from people's profiles on Prosper, it brought even more traffic and drove the owners/participants to make the forums there more public.  In fact, Monday this week almost saw a new high in number of people logged in to the site at the same time.  In addition to the increase in traffic, we've also seen several new blogs pop-up as has been documented in various places.  You can find links to a number of them here.

Someone mentioned in another blog (I'm too lazy to go find out exactly who it was) about something known as the Barbara Streisand effect.  Basically it means that attempts to suppress something cause the exact opposite effect, an increase in knowlege about it.

At any rate, I don't know exactly what Prosper was hoping to accomplish with it's attempts to suppress the community it started.  I do know that every day, I keep seeing more and more people doing things to expand the community and knowlege of Prosper's actions as widely as possible.  I wonder if Prosper was just trying to get the community off their hands so they didn't have to deal with them at all.  Then they could spend more time on their core business?  Would that make sense?  I don't know.

Every so often, I get "the bug" and go read a few posts in the new forums, usually when I'm logged in to my account for other reasons.  Occasionally I try to post.  Every time I post I get the message that my post is "pending moderator review" or something to that effect.  That is just so lame.

In addition, yesterday, on Prospers.org, it came out that any time someone posted a link that mentioned that website, it was changed to Prosper.com.  After much wailing and gnashing of teeth by forum participants, apparently this was changed to just edit links to use "***" so they wouldn't be real links.

I don't know who is behind all this nonsense that is the Prosper forums but they have some serious issues if they think this will become acceptable.  People who care are going to care less and less if this keeps up.  Prosper is going to need to do some serious PR repair pretty soon if they can't get their act together.  Lenders who are pulling out will have months, if not years, to be constantly reminded of why they don't like Prosper.  They will be telling a lot of friends and family, to say nothing of opportunities to broadcast their displeasure in various places on the internet.

Prosper really needs to find a way to reach out to these people and stop this foolishness they've embarked upon.  Prosper is going to lose if they don't I firmly believe.

I really don't like the new forums.  I mentioned yesterday that they are very slow and that seems to be the case for most everyone who uses them.  In addition, most posts appear to need to be specifically approved by a moderator before they are actually posted.  This is cumbersome and impedes any sort of conversation.

My new complaints include the fact that I have to be logged in to even read most of the posts.  In the old forums, I frequently would lurk as a guest and read the posts I wanted to read when I had a few minutes to kill.  Now, I have to go through the login process every time I want to read something since I get timed out if I stay gone too long.  That is just annoying.  The only board I can actually read if I'm logged out is the Announcements forum and it is only updated once in awhile.

Part of the problem with all this is that if someone new wants to check out the site, they would have to actually create an account to read most of what is posted.  That's just dumb.

Combined with the slowness of the board to load pages and the fact that I have to log in to read them, I don't see myself spending a lot of time there anymore.  It's just not worth the trouble.

Prosper introduced their new forums last night in a site update. It appears they are hosted by Prosper itself and don't require a separate login. I was able to create a post as soon as I found the page, having already logged in to my Prosper account.

So far, I'm very unimpressed.

- The forums load very slowly, to the point of being useless.

- Each post is 100% moderated meaning you can post now but who knows when the post will actually appear, if at all.

I don't know if the moderation will be eased but if not, I probably won't be posting there very often. My first post was about a bug I've noticed. That was probably the most useful aspect of the previous forums anymore anyway so I may just stick with that and otherwise not use the forums now unless changes are made.