Advertising in posts/contact details in signatures

S

S.L.F

Guest
I'm somewhat confused by the guidelines on advertising in posts. I thought you couldn't put your contact details into posts.

Now after reporting a post I find that it is possible to have your details in a post if your post in some way relates to the subject matter.

I thought that this thread laid the ground work so we'd all knew where we stood.

http://www.askaboutmoney.com/showthread.php?t=100790

If the poster had asked could he have his contact details instead of asking could he reccommend himself would the answer have been different
 
Re: Advertising in posts

Hi S.L.F.

The issue is covered in



Putting contact details in your signature

If you are a service provider you are welcome to put in your contact details or website in your signature but only on posts where your signature is relevant. We welcome the fact that some providers develop a reputation on Askaboutoney for being well informed, well written and genuinely helpful. If you get clients as a result of that, we are delighted.

You should not attach your signature to posts which are not relevant to the service you provide as this is advertising. So a mortgage intermediary can put her signature on mortgages, house buying and related financial topics, but should not have her signature on posts in the motoring forum.

If the vast majority of your posts relate to the service you provide, in practice, you might forget to remove your signature from unrelated posts. However, when you see this, you should edit your post appropriately. (You can leave your signature on posts before the 4th February 2009, the date of implementation of this new guideline)

Under no circumstances should you advertise a rewards scheme and affiliation scheme or any form of viral marketing. For example "click here for R Points"

Signatures should not be used to promote websites which you don't own, whether commercial or not. This does not prevent you from providing links to other relevant websites in posts.

If you think a signature might not be acceptable, then it probably isn't. We will only ask you once to change your signature. If you abuse the rule again, we will ban you from using signatures completely. The moderators will not enter into discussions on this.
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Re: Advertising in posts

I see now that it needs to be updated, as we have since disabled the signature function.

Is the guideline fairly clear? I would be interested in any feedback or suggestions to make it even clearer.

We probably should add the following when we are updating it.

Do not invite people to contact you.

Do not answer questions or tout for business by PM if you are a service provider. We consider this spam and it results in an immediate ban.
 
Re: Advertising in posts

S.L.F said:
I thought that this thread laid the ground work so we'd all knew where we stood.

http://www.askaboutmoney.com/showthread.php?t=100790

If the poster had asked could he have his contact details instead of asking could he reccommend himself would the answer have been different
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This is purely for the recommendations forum.

So to answer your question "Can a service provider recommend himself by putting in his contact details?" , the answer is "No".
 
Re: Advertising in posts

If a friend recommends a solicitor/tax advisor/plumber to you, you have very little to go on to assess their competence or integrity.

If they post on Askaboutmoney you can check their posts and make a reasonable assessment of them.

I have probably used the services of three or four advisors from reading their contributions on Askaboutmoney.
 
What I feel myself is if you are going to have a rule it should be a hard rule where it's easy to understand.

No advertising

Maybe you could put a notice out saying people can advertise on their home pages in the 'about me' section.

Lets face facts if someone is interested enough in a posters ramblings they will look up their home page and see what else they do.

Maybe leave a phone number on their home page or a link to their website.

If someone decides to come on AAM and have their user name the same as their business name would that be ok?
 
Someone can use their business name as their askaboutmoney name, but they can not post on any topics, other than ones related to their business.

We warned a guy recently for posting "Agreed" and "confirmed" on a few posts which we took to be pure advertising.

Brendan
 
Brendan said:
Someone can use their business name as their askaboutmoney name, but they can not post on any topics, other than ones related to their business.

We warned a guy recently for posting "Agreed" and "confirmed" on a few posts which we took to be pure advertising.

Brendan
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I'm sure a good few people would have put their company names in instead of their made-up user names if they had known this.

Can you link to the posting guideline that relates to this?

On boards.ie there is a straight no advertising rule which I'm inclined to agree with, I've always been an 'all in or all out out' kinda guy so the rules here on AAM confuse me.

To recap

It's possible to advertise in a post that relates to your business if you put something pertinent in and as long as it's not in the recommendations forum.

If your user name is your business name you are not allowed to post anywhere except where your business is related to eg BrownsCarRepairs could post in about cars or anything to do with motoring but couldn't post about the state of the economy or in LOS (unless it relates to cars or the business he's in), but could post about losses of jobs in the industry he's involved with.
 
The Posting Guidelines do not cover every possible eventuality. I actually want people to read them. if they are pages long, they won't read them.

We do not consider contact details on the bottom of a meaningful post to be advertising.
 
Brendan said:
We do not consider contact details on the bottom of a meaningful post to be advertising.
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Sorry Brendan but this doesn't make sense.

Well at least not to me (I'll ask the wife later to explain it to me:D).

It reminds me of a shop keeper who I used to go to to get a sandwich, I asked one of his staff for a sandwich with 2 sausages so when I got back to the workshop I discovered there was only 1 sausage in between the 2 slices of bread.

I went back to the shop and queried it and he told me he considered it to be 2 sausages because they were jumbo sausages.
 
Brendan said:
Someone can use their business name as their askaboutmoney name, but they can not post on any topics, other than ones related to their business.
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That seems unreasonable

Look at my username.

It's the username I use on most bulletin boards and actually predates the company formation.


Brendan said:
We warned a guy recently for posting "Agreed" and "confirmed" on a few posts which we took to be pure advertising.
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That's spammy and not particularly useful for anyone
 
blacknight said:
Brendan said:
Someone can use their business name as their askaboutmoney name, but they can not post on any topics, other than ones related to their business.
Click to expand...
That seems unreasonable
Look at my username.
It's the username I use on most bulletin boards and actually predates the company formation.
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And what about where someone's username is their actual name, which also happens to be the name of their business?
 
blacknight said:
So why not simply enable signatures?
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We are run by volunteers.

Signatures were causing too many problems for moderators.

People were posting on other topics with their signature enabled.

People were putting rubbish in their signatures.

It's simpler not to allow them.

Links are more "advertising" than user names as Google rates the site linked to based on the popularity of the site from which it is linked. We have had many cases of people posting rubbish just to include links. Some of the links were actually hidden, so they were not obvious to me, but apparently the spiders saw them. For that reason, we tend to delete rubbishy posts from new users in case they are spam.

Brendan
 
Brendan said:
Links are more "advertising" than user names as Google rates the site linked to based on the popularity of the site from which it is linked.

Brendan
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I'm not so concerned about what Google thinks I'd just like clear rules on what is constrewed as being advertising.

I would think that a person who has a user name the very same as their business to be advertising.

I would think that someone who puts their contact details into a post to be advertising.

Posting guideling 5 is very clear "No Advertising"
 
S.L.F said:
I'm not so concerned about what Google thinks I'd just like clear rules on what is constrewed as being advertising.
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You might not be concerned. But you don't have to spend 10 minutes every day deleting spam posts by people trying to boost their google ratings.

You don't have to engage with correspondence with posters who have included a link to their site but I have deleted their post because it added nothing to the discussion.
 
Advertising to me is making an offer... "we sell x product" "10% off etc." This should never be accepted as it will annoy too many people.

A link is a link, not an advertisement, its about 20 or so letters at the end of a post, nothing more. I feel that if someone makes a significant effort to print meaningful material then a link can be seen as a reward for contributing to the good content of the website. A lot of posters provide free advice here that readers could in some cases have to purchase elsewhere. To me rewarding experts in certain areas with a link is a good idea if they contribute value to the website.

If someone makes a significant amount of decent posts, maybe they should be allowed to have a link. If they abuse this privilage then the link privilage could be taken away from them.
 
StevieC said:
If someone makes a significant amount of decent posts, maybe they should be allowed to have a link. If they abuse this privilage then the link privilage could be taken away from them.
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That's what a lot of forums do

You can easily control signatures via usergroups in vbulletin

For example, user has to have been registered for X days, made Y number of posts and they get moved to usergroup X with permissions to have a signature
 
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