Sites – Page 12 – Paintball Headlines

Don’t Link to 68Caliber.com. According to Them, It’s Illegal.

68Caliber.com, which I’m not going to link to, ever again, has a nice friendly article saying that they don’t allow anyone to reproduce their articles.

That’s understandable. No one wants someone taking your whole articles and reproducing them somewhere else claiming them as their own. That’s just not that cool.

But they don’t stop there. You now need permission to link to their articles. Yes, you have to put in an application just to link to their articles. How’s that for idiotic?

People go to your site by linking to it. If no one links to it, no one goes to it. If no one links to it, your SERP placement is going to fall.

They’re shooting themselves in the foot. Being over protective of your content doesn’t really help. I’m sure most people won’t even notice or care about your restrictions. That’s just the way it is. Put some sort of blocks in (you already don’t have a full content RSS feed) or offer something good and entertaining so people actually want to go to your site.

Plus, they’re actually being pretty hypocritical. If they don’t want people link to their article, they should add Disallow: / to their robots.txt so now search engine or whatever will index their site. They’re clearly linking to them. They should be stopped to.

But I’ve got a deal. If they’ll say that they’ll allow anyone, and not just this site, to link to them, like I’m pretty sure everyone can legally do, then I might start reading and linking to their stories again. If not, I can easily get content from hundreds of other sources.

Paintballguns.net acquires Pb-Addict.com. Correct spelling not required.

So the site paintballguns.net (yes, their name includes the .net part), acquires PB-addict.com. Not sure what the whole terms were, but I think it went something like this:

paintballguns.net– Hey, I’ll give $50 for pb-addict.com
pb-addict.com– $50? Hell yeah, man. Should we warn people of this?
paintballguns.net– No, no, they’ll be more likely to leave them. Let’s just surprise them one day.
pb-addict.com– Sweet. Can’t wait till I get that $50.

And since they didn’t tell any of the pb-addict members, everyone is mad about it. All 3 of them. Maybe 4.

And what about the traffic? Basically crap. paintballguns.net is leading the pack, but it has about the same or lower reach than my personal blog.

And you also have to love how he misspelled ‘acquires’ in the title of his post. What, your spell checker doesn’t work in text boxes?

But enough on pointless acquisitions today, back to news that might affect more than 5 people.

A Brief Mobzor History

Between theÂ post, PBshots. Useless, and the post, PBshots, Slightly Less Useless, I talked to Andrew, the owner of mobzor.com.

He told me how he came up with the idea for a “myspace for paintball,” put the site online, and quickly found that at least two others had alreadyÂ implemented the same idea.

Â His comments were very similar to those ofÂ James in theÂ Slightly Less UselessÂ post. “IÂ don’t want mobzor.com to be a copycat site,” he said.Â He knows that he needs something to set Mobzor/PBshots apart from pbspace.com and paintballalliance.com, and heÂ has a couple things that he is working on.

He said that as long as there is a demand for a paintball specificÂ social networkingÂ site, mobzor.com will survive.Â “Mobzor’s alexa.com ranking is already higher than PBspace,” he said.Â Â “Before the Mobzor site went down and switched from phpfox to phpizabi, Mobzor’s Alexa ranking was close to breaking the 1 million mark.”
(After the siteÂ crash, all data was lost and the site restarted with zero members)

By comparison, paintballalliance.com, with over 3,000 members,Â is ranked at 719,000 by Alexa, (paintballheadlines.com is ranked at 831,000 and pbnation.com is at 17,500).

Now that Paintballalliance has been auctioned off, it will be interesting to see how the future of paintball social networking unfolds.

PbShots, Slightly Less Useless

PbShots, the photo hosting site Mobzor launched, has upgraded their limits for free users.

Now, you have 1 GB (technically, 1000 MB, 24 MB short of a gig) of space, which is still half of what Photobucket offers. No mention of an increase in bandwidth though. But it still hilariously says the limit is 20/255 in the admin panel.

You probably want to edit that config.php file, guys.

In case anyone is wondering, they are using IMS Pro, though there is a chance they’re just using the Basic version. If you want to have your own image hosting site like PbShots, all you need it to pay $100 + ~$5 month. Then you can be all cool and think you have some great idea. Though you can easily find cheaper and free alternatives to IMS Pro, that are o so much better.

Please Mobzor, stop just buying crappy scripts, slapping some logos and ads on them, and try to be some great company. It’s not going to happen. Actually code something or have a new idea. All your ideas have been done before, better. Mobzor = Paintball Alliance, but with less people (I would add pbspace, but they suck worse than you), and PbShots = Jayloo, but crappier.

And sorry for the lack of posting. Just been taking a break from things. I promise they’ll pick up again in a few days.

Dye Launches New Dyematrix.com

Dye launched a redesign of Dyematrix.com.

If you think they got rid of the gaudy flash, think again. It’s still all done in flash, except for the forums which are using the ever so mediocre Invision Power Boards. It even has some sort of music playing on the home, which the mute button is almost impossible to find, and makes a sound every time you hover over a menu link. Personally, I don’t need an audio confirmation when I hover over a link.

It also now has a few links to YouTube in their “media” section, which, for the most part, are just ads. Though, really, the whole media section is one big ad. You can even view DM7 ads. That’s exactly what I’ve always wanted to do. Too bad Adblock blocks them. And once that’s fixed, they’re still really small.

Sorry, but wouldn’t you think a 2 page ad should have a bit higher resolution.

Come on Dye, you could do much better.