Advertising limits

[UH-Matt]

How about making it so advertisers have to be a little more active before they can post adverts?

Example:

http://www.hosthideout.com/search.php?s=&action=showresults&searchid=19905&sortby=lastpost&sortorder=descending

[beley]

Good idea.

[markblair]

Please specify some words or valid user names to search on. There were no matches for those that you specified.

The link above doesn't go to anything specific for me. Was there an actual thread regarding this or is it just to use the search function more? Thanks...

[UH-Matt]

The search shows a particular user who has made 13 posts. Every one of the posts is identicle and an advert. He basically comes here to post an ad then goes away for a week, then comes back to post another ad exactly the same... its just anti-social!

[Chicken]

My feeling on providing the ad forum is that some members will use it as their first posts, some may only advertise, some may never post ads. The ad forums have a few purposes, one of which being to kep the main forums spam-free, another to give people a chance to post offers directly to other members and a thread to discuss the offer. They may (one day) turn into members who contribute more, they might not. They might see something to comment on, or have a question, etc. Even just posting ads is a contribution, though not the only contribution we'd like to see obviously.

I know there's always strong opinions about ad forums and posts in the ad forums (elsewhere), however I've always felt that the ad forums serve a limited purpose, they do what they do, nothing more, nothing less.

There may be a time when there is a need to limit things so that new members must post x posts before being able to use the ad forums, however I've never really liked that idea much, as I feel it may invite spamming of the main forums. Sometimes people want to post ads, and the ad forums give them a place to do that in a specific place.

[beley]

Originally posted by Chicken:

My feeling on providing the ad forum is that some members will use it as their first posts, some may only advertise, some may never post ads. The ad forums have a few purposes, one of which being to kep the main forums spam-free, another to give people a chance to post offers directly to other members and a thread to discuss the offer. They may (one day) turn into members who contribute more, they might not. They might see something to comment on, or have a question, etc. Even just posting ads is a contribution, though not the only contribution we'd like to see obviously.

I know there's always strong opinions about ad forums and posts in the ad forums (elsewhere), however I've always felt that the ad forums serve a limited purpose, they do what they do, nothing more, nothing less.

There may be a time when there is a need to limit things so that new members must post x posts before being able to use the ad forums, however I've never really liked that idea much, as I feel it may invite spamming of the main forums. Sometimes people want to post ads, and the ad forums give them a place to do that in a specific place. Good point. I imagine that after a while you'll clean out the old ads in the forum? That would sure turn into a huge overhead on the database, especially since after about a month they're obsolete anyway.

[Adam]

Yeah i agree Chick.

As you said maybe you do need to use limitations but as a direct result you would undoubtedly have people posting either useless posts or just spamming in other forums to get their count high enough to use the designated forum.

You cuold ban the user that does this although they could always just join again and thus having wasted some of your admin time.

Brandon raised a good point in terms of keeping the database low etc as it's true most offers are pretty much ended in a months time and even if someone is advertising an actual service - nto as a special offer or anything; after a month they are so many pages into the ads forum that hardly anyone will actually go back that far to them pages.