The decision to moderate everything was made (with our input/disagreement) by the team(s) that manage the entire SCN. I also wish that I did not have to approve every single post. After all, why have reputation points if they can't be used to do things like avoid moderation? We have made our opinions known but while we do have a say, we are a small part of the entire SCN community, and must follow the rules they set.

I would encourage you to use the "Contact Us" link (from the bottom of any SCN page) and send a message to the SCN support folks voicing your displeasure. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Finally, you can continue to blame me for slow moderation times. This is not an excuse, but we don't get proactive notifications that something needs moderation, so I need to actually visit the moderation page to see if anything needs to be approved. I am trying to do this a few times per day.

Maybe the people behind SCN should have a look at this site and how it works. The only thing I like about SCN is, that you can "Follow" each and every article to see any updates. The rest especially the nonsense of having to reauthenticate as soon as one of the links lead you to a new server of the SCN domain is really annoying.

So my plea to the folks of SQLA is to fight for this forum against the SAP uniform websites.

Hi Breck,

I just posted a reply to your thread on SCN.

Here's also the text of my reply: Hi Breck,

It’s great to see some new Sybase folks “over here” on SCN joining in with the other 2 million visitors we see here every month.

Sorry you’re having trouble posting. For many years SCN did not require moderation for new members. We actually would have preferred to keep it that way. However, SCN became a victim of it’s own success. Over the last several years, SCN has implemented strong SEO practices that make it a very favorable place to post content that quickly is picked up by Google search engines. That’s been great for our members who like the fact that their new posts are quickly found by others looking to engage or to solve problems with their solutions.

However, what’s been good for our members also looked like an opportunity for spammers. In February, we were hit suddenly and aggressively with a flood of spam posts. Spammers found SCN to be a valuable place to post their content because it quickly got picked up by Google search engines. (For example, one spam post at the time received over 60,000 search impressions and 5,000 clicks.) Over the ensuing weeks, spammers created over 300 new SCN accounts and over 3,700 spam posts. Clearly that was not good for the community or for SCN since Google applies manual penalties when it finds spam on your site.

We worked actively to remove spam posts as they occurred and also implemented some new technical approaches to thwart the heavy spam activity. One of those is to require new member accounts to have their content moderated until they’ve earned a relatively small number of points so we feel they are trustworthy to be able to post directly. To date, those approaches have been effective in eliminating the spam we were seeing previously.

It sounds like you have some suggestions for other ways to solve aggressive spamming on community sites. We’d welcome your input. Feel free to comment here or reach out to me at chip(dot)Rodgers(at)sap(dot)com.

We hope you come to like the active and engaged community we have here at SCN and hope to hear more from you in the future!

Best, Chip

Breck is right, this is maddening.

Four months ago, I submitted a feedback message about a bad link on the SAP SQL Anywhere home page. That link has been fixed. That's the good part.

This morning, I got an email that my message "has been moved to SAP Sybase SQL Anywhereby SCN moderators. Selecting the correct space is important to ensure your content gets the right visibility and increases its chances of receiving responses quickly from other SCN users. To find a relevant space, visit the Finding Topic Spaces on SCN."

So, after four months, a moderator got around to deciding that the appropriate response to my message was to tell me I posted it in the wrong topic. (<sarcasm>What is this, StackOverflow?</sarcasm>)

Oh, and the "View the message" link in their email tells me that I'm "Unauthorized" to see my message.

Clearly, the moderation process is not functioning well.

For the record: my original message was: "On the SQL Anywhere main page http://scn.sap.com/community/sybase-sql-anywhere, the link "SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere Developer Edition" offers you SQL Anywhere 11.0.1, an old version. You want to offer SQL Anywhere 16, the latest version, or at minimum SQL Anywhere 12.0.1."

I did some poking around, and here is what I found:
Changes to moderation were made March 13 of this year as part of the gamification initiative on SCN. Details were posted here: Basically, you should only be moderated if you are a new user and/or your SCN point score is less than 30. Accumulating points on SCN works very similar to the way it works on this site.
This actually makes sense and seems acceptable to me.
However, I also read that there are still some issues with posts being inaccurately flagged for moderation. If this happens to you, please report it so the SCN folks can get it fixed.