Commercial Boards.ie

Orion

The mods who read this will know I reported the same guy in 3 forums for the same post advertising his new forum and that he had his post edited in at least three others before I reported his spam. And spam it was and deserved reporting but ...

... This post is about the earlier edits. A couple of the mod-edits told him to pay to advertise. I fully understand that boards.ie is a non-profit organisation by philosophy but that it is not a place for others to make money off its good name. But where is the line? This guy, misguided as he was to spam at least 8 forums deserved his edits/deletions, but his forum was also a free forum. Others have advertised their forums on boards before. Unreal.ie has a sticky in the Unreal board, toutless is in a few sigs and is run by a respected member of the boards.ie community. And I'm sure there are other examples that I'm not aware of. Commercial shills deserve outright bans to be sure. But the tone of the two or three edits did concern me that someone would need to pay to mention that there's another forum around for a specific goal. It seems a little commercial.

I suppose the point of this post in Feedback is ... where is the line? If I set up a free forum for a specific goal - eg Primary Education and mentioned it in a post is that a breach of the ToS of boards.ie? I'm not suggesting that boards.ie would be threatened by such a thing - it wouldn't of course. It may be that the earlier edits were just a little zealous on behalf of boards. I'd be interested in the comments of the gods admins particularly in curiosity as to the direction that boards is taking.

Disclaimer
I'm not setting up any such forum - this is an exercise in curiosity

[edit - the topic is crap I know - I couldn't think of a better one for what I was talking about.]

Overheal

Yeah: Spankeh has a lot to answer for!

Rev Hellfire

There's a difference between sites like unreal.ie (and quake.ie) which grew out of boards.ie or have had historical ties to boards.ie and someone spamming their forum across multiple fora.

As for having a link to your site in your sig, that is permissible afaik.

stevenmu

It generally ok to link your own non-profit/commercial site when it's particularly relevant and contributes to the topic or forum.

When a post is reported as spam, or a mod spots something that looks spammy, generally they would check the link out, try to evaluate it as commercial or not, evaluate it's relevance and worth, check the users history on boards to see if they're posting it willy-nilly around other forums, and possibly even search to see if the same is being done on other sites. Also established users are generally treated less suspiciously than one-hit wonders.

I don't know the specific posts mentioned in the OP, but if they were across 8 forums I'd imagine they were just an attempt to draw traffic rather than anything of any actual use. Even if it's not for actual monetary gain, it's still attempting to gain from boards without giving anything back so that would count as spam imo.

Orion

as I said in the OP I had no problem with the spam being deleted. My post is only really about the implication in two mod-edits that he should have to pay to advertise a free forum.

It's no biggy - just something that caught my attention last night.

Sparky

Overheal wrote: »

Yeah: Spankeh has a lot to answer for!

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