discuss Affiliate ADS in signatures

Forums are dying..Facebook (other big social media sites) are replacing forums.

Pretty sure that you have to be signed in to see signatures so they don't get indexed.. @Support Team

I think the main problem would be policing / verification.

I sometimes have one in my signature, but I wouldn't necessarily be against what you propose. Mind you .. I don't think anyone could complain that my posts lack tangible content! lol .. I may have only been around a couple of years, but I'm likely already at least top 5 in terms of my percentage of the NamePros database in pure file size .. lol. I'm curious if there's anyone (with over 100 posts) that have anything close to my "characters per post" ratio?

What actually bugs me in a similar way of people developing "fake forum authority", is the countless "likes" in the welcome threads that people get sometime just for writing "Welcome to NP". In fact I'm convinced most people only post welcoming messages there just because it's super easy to up their like count.

What I find super entertaining is that despite my always trying to post longer welcoming messages with actual content .. and more specifically with actually content related to what the original posted actually wrote .. that some people seem to deliberately not give me a like, while giving others with a 12 character reply a like! lol

Similarly with likes in the "domains you bought in ..." threads. Just because someone posts a good domain is not the proper reason to give them a forum like. Forum likes should be based on bringing actual value to the conversation. If someone post a domain they bought and explained the reason for it, then even if you don't think it's a good domain, it could still be appropriate to give a like if as part of their reasoning for buying the domain, they explain some concepts/ideas that could be helpful to others.


Anyhow .. to get back to the point .. the real issue with the signatures then becomes .. can Bob Parson come become a member and technically be the only person allowed to post GoDaddy affiliate links in his signature? lol

I say GoDaddy because it's fairly obvious, but there are hundreds of smaller registrars out there whose ownership not only is unknown, but could actually be private. Same goes for the various domain services out there. Policing would unfortunately be a nightmare.

briguy said:

Forums are dying..Facebook (other big social media sites) are replacing forums.

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What planet have you been on? lol .. Forums HAVE BEEN dead for a decade. I had what was once the biggest DJ/Club music community in the world for a couple of years at the start of the millenium, and indeed it was eventually social media and namely Facebook that totally killed it (and 95% of other forums out there) ... but the irony is that now in turn FaceBook is dying. It will never completely die .. but the average person spends far less time on FB today than in 2008! Can't really compare "page views" with all the scrolling, but average time per person is likely a quarter of what it once was. I actually see forums in general returning to some degree .. facebook ironically makes it almost impossible to have a quality community of any reasonable size .. forums still are the only alternative for that.

I am talking about people having only affiliate links to websites of no relations to the poster for the only purpose of collecting a commission.

MapleDots said:

I am talking about people having only affiliate links to websites of no relations to the poster for the only purpose of collecting a commission.

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Yeah .. but does that mean a GoDaddy employee can come and put a GD affiliate link in their signature?

Similarly, what about all the smaller registrars and domain services out there where staff and ownership isn't verifiable. Those likely account for 90% of all domain related companies.

Maybe a simpler ultimate solution is just not allowing any affiliate links at all? That would pretty much be the only solution for the issue you're talking about. So Bob Parson and GD employees could still link to GD as much as they want, but there would be no real incentive for anyone else to do that.


Mind you .. just thought of another thing .. you also have the issue of URL shorteners .. even if moderators visually checked signatures, they would have to actually click on all of them to be sure there were no redirects. For example .. I could put Ategy.com/1234 as a link .. but then in the background that link actually redirects to a GoDaddy affiliate link.


I understand what you're saying .. and again .. I'm not even against it in theory if it could be applied evenly and fairly .. it's just that I don't really see it realistically possible for it to be policed and verified effectively. Unless maybe I overlooked something? (which is very possible .. lol) ... What did you have in mind?

Lol.. @Ategy.com only other forum that I participate in is BHW..have to keep an eye on what the "bad boys" are up to..lol

You do have a gift for content.. there are only a few other members that I use the scroll bar for..that is a compliment

briguy said:

Forums are dying

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Forums are alive and well, but the viewership is spread across more options now. It's similar to cable television, which had a larger viewership years ago before they had to share viewers with Netflix, Hulu, etc. Cable television is far from dead, but there are more options now, and that's a good thing: everyone gets to choose what gets their attention.

As long as forums continue to evolve, which they will, they will always have a place online.

Stay tuned to see how we evolve!

briguy said:

Pretty sure that you have to be signed in to see signatures

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Correct, signatures are shown to logged-in members.

Ategy.com said:

I'm curious if there's anyone (with over 100 posts) that have anything close to my "characters per post" ratio?

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That would be an interesting statistic to examine one day!