Digital Spy

I’ve left the website now. I’ve moved here since the people at DS were acting like a**holes.

Been getting those annoying adverts again this afternoon preventing me from scrolling up the page. Annoyingly playing audio too.

No (non-porno) website seems to have had more problems with dodgy adverts down the years than DS have.

I can't be bothered reading articles on DS any more. A few paltry lines of text followed by countless GIFs unrelated to the article and then about 50 Twitter reactions to it which are bad enough on their own but then they insist on typing out the tweet underneath them anyway as a way of filling up the page. Lazy article writing and a real shame for a website that was once very highly thought of and a great source for more technical TV industry stories and it's now no better than a glossy showbiz rag.

The technical stuff is long gone sadly.

I imagine James Welsh doesn't care how much it's gone downhill though, he must be minted from how much he sold the site off at even though that's what triggered the move downmarket.

Quite honestly DS has "had its day".

It was good years ago (even when the wicked Beth Hart was "chief mod"), however nowadays it seems to be used as a forum to attack people.

It does not matter if you have a different opinion to me, we all have the right to say our piece without being viciously attacked by one (or more) users.

It is most probably one of the worst moderated forums on the internet.

X can attack Y and get away with it, the post reported and nothing happens.
Y can respond to X's comments and be banned

WTF is that about?

All the criticisms levied against the site and forums are spot on.

TV Forum looks a lot better place to be!

I was on Digital Spy years ago but got banned because they thought I had a sockpuppet account. When I explained my flatmate at the time was registered to the site and posted from the same IP address they had none of it and stopped replying. Conveniently they changed the rules thereafter to reflect this, but they never made a u-turn on my account.

In hindsight I'm glad they banned me, it has morphed into a dump. Shameless clickbaiting, horrific layout, biased moderation.

I think the biggest casualty was removing the comments thread. I guess they preferred people not telling them how terrible their website was instead of actually doing a good job.

Another "improvement" by DS recently was the removal of the facility to add embedded media.

Support
Posts: 30,642
Administrator
01/08/18 - 13:18
Please note we are experiencing difficulties with the smart embed functionality, which is currently disabled on the DS Forums. We apologise for any inconvenience and hope to have this functionality restored in the future.

Now you'd probably put up with stuff like that if the site was Moderated fairly, but it now seems if your face doesn't fit or the right noises aren't being made on 'right-on' causes, you're treated less favourably than one of the self-appointed SJW wind-up merchants who flame discussion specifically with a view to then go reporting to their Mods, who further compound the problem by believing their nonsense.

It's blatantly obvious it's to shut down discussion against members who hold a different view, but unfortunately DS Mods are complicit in the behaviour by not dealing with the root cause of the problem at it's source.

It's the worst kind of hive mindset & I don't blame DS members for jumping ship, if for no other reason but to protect their sanity & I feel a damning indictment on how far DS has fallen in the past few Years.

I’m a member on there and a few months ago ended up getting barred from posting for a week and given a final warning as I started retaliating to people who were baiting and being crass and snide to me. I reported them and nothing got done.

Please don’t shoot me for what I am about to type - but this just seems true.... unless you’re pro-eu or gay then you’ll never win an argument on DS.

(I have pro-eu and gay friends by the way - and we don’t bicker lol)

I don't think it's that at all. It's poor moderation across the board. I got a warning after returning thanks to their amnesty for something minute in comparison.

The standard of conversation continues to be ridiculously poor.