Associate links

[Ivain]

At present, there's a rule that prevents people from posting links that will make them revenue.
This is intended to stop adfly link spamming and the likes.
However, what we do have is lots of sales reps etc that post links to discords or websites, which could theoretically make them money because they got their company a job.

What I would like to ask is if the rule can be amended to allow for so-called 'associate links'. This would be a link to a product by someone else on this site (it MUST be directly related to the section and thread it is posted in!), and if the purchase is made through that link, the person gets a share of the profit.

The difference is that clicking on that link itself will NOT generate revenue in any way. It's basically what sales reps already do, but more directly.

Ofc there'd need to be conditions, such as aforementioned relevancy, as well as no cold-calling with links and the likes.

Since I am biased on this matter, I'd like to hear what others think about this suggestion and any problems it might cause.

At the very least, I want to make sure that it's allowed to PM people links like this if they have a relevant thread up.

 

[78230]

Perfect idea, wish I came up with it

 

[utaninja]

Perfect idea, wish I came up with it

http://usetheagreebutton.com/

 

[Mick]

I can see what you're saying, but I have no clue how we could reword that rule to clearly and concisely explain what you're saying. Justis, you're the rule God, how could we fix this?

Thread unlocked.

 

[Justis]

Current rule:

1.16 Do not post links with the intention of producing revenue or other content from users clicking the link.

I've not seen anyone believe that perhaps this rule prevents sales reps from advertising their products/services, which is the job they're paid to do. The fact that nobody has believed this to be the case is made even more obvious by the lack of activity in this suggestion thread, however, here's a minor adjustment of the phrasing to make our enforcement clearer without saturating the sentence.

1.16 Do not post links with the intention of automatically generating revenue/content from clicks/visitations.

 

[Mick]

Current rule:

I've not seen anyone believe that perhaps this rule prevents sales reps from advertising their products/services, which is the job they're paid to do. The fact that nobody has believed this to be the case is made even more obvious by the lack of activity in this suggestion thread, however, here's a minor adjustment of the phrasing to make our enforcement clearer without saturating the sentence.

Sounds good to me, I'll move this to pending.

Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[Mick]

Since this suggestion was made we've updated the phrasing of the rule to be more clear, but very soon we're going to be making drastic changes to the rule against referrals which will make this suggestion no longer appropriate to implement. With XF2, we're planning on rewording the rule to allow for referral codes (even annoying adf.ly ones) to be posted, as long as they're clearly labelled as referral ads.

This is quite a drastic change and we've had rules against referral codes for basically forever, so I'm eager to see how it plays out.

For now though I'll move this to denied, thanks for the suggestion Ivain.