Membership in a cluster group

[AgencyEquity]

More and more agencies are joining clusters and membership in these organizations is probably at an all time high. The biggest reason for making a decision to join is access to more markets and higher profit sharing. Has your agency joined or thought about joining a cluster or similar type of group? What is your experience?

[jackolive]

Well rob i suggest you try a bit harder. As for the topic, i haven't had a whole lot of experience on the subject, but i hear from colleagues very good things.

[sankykid]

I think the quality of these last two posts is indicative of the poor quality of many recent posts. It's seems clear to me that both of these posts and many more on other topics are simply spamming the message board so they can include their link in the signature line. They're transforming a useful and informative forum into nothing more than a waste of time.

[jackwehoca]

Let's not forget to also include sarcasm and name-calling when witnessing what the forums have become.

There used to be some good info that you could pick up ; now seems to be taken hostage by those that don't actually produce anything, so have time to use the forums as a sounding board.

Too bad-used to be good source of info and people were helpful!!!

[jcardrant]

I agree with some points from both "sankykid " and "jackwehoca". From an admin perspective, it can be very difficult to determine if someone is just posting to get their link out there, or just making a useless comment for the sake of commenting. Almost all posts of this type are checked to see if the registrants email has been flagged as a spammer on a ban list, if it isn't found there, then it is hard to justify deleting it if it isn't breaking rules. Another thing that probably isn't realized by people posting to try to improve their website traffic or ranking in search engines is that all these types of footer links are "nofollow"-ed, so they aren't counted by Google anyway. If you see a post that you think is spam, flag it by clicking on the little exclamation point icon so it stands out. These forums are checked at least once per day, everyday, even on the weekends. But this isn't the only area of maintenance that we have to do, and sometimes things get missed. If you find something offensive or see something we missed, feel free to contact myself or Josh:

Josh Carlson
VP of Technology | Wells Publishing, Inc.
619.584.1100 x119 | jcarlson@wellspublishing.com

Jeff Cardrant
Web Developer | Wells Publishing, Inc.
619.584.1100 x143 | jcardrant@insurancejournal.com