No more ads in chat
- Thread starter Andy B.
- Start date
PebbleHost
High performance, consistent uptime and fast support. Minecraft hosting that just works.
This is a really good question, unfortunately it does not, however, it is very rare that our thread is bumped. More often that not I find myself advertising in chat than bumping my thread(s).
Maybe that’s something for MCM to consider as well, how bumping threads could eliminate this chat box challenge.
I just really want to point this out here.
What this thread is suggesting is a fix to a symptom of a problem that's been pretty apparent for a while now. The symptom being excessive ads relative to the amount of conversation in the chatbox at any given time. The problem being that people aren't holding as many, or as frequent lively conversations as they used to.
Personally I don't have a solution to that and I don't want this response to rile people up more. I think what people need to realise though is that this market is being taken in a direction where the chat is not considered the priority, and resources are. What I'm not saying is that we shouldn't care about it, but it helps when you can consider what's happening in the context of the site as a whole.
Personally i don't see the issue, granted i haven't been here as long as some of you but i have 22 resources after being here a few months and i've never advertised in chat so far but, from my short time experience i've barely ever seen many people talking in there anyway and i'm online pretty much every day.
Maybe a suggestion of being able to disable ads and have those placing an ad setting it as an ad in some way.
Maybe a suggestion of being able to disable ads and have those placing an ad setting it as an ad in some way.
Last edited:
I disagree. Although chatbox advertising isn't viable, it's still partly affective for their business. If website ads weren't so expensive, they would take to those. If were going to remove ads from shoutbox, make ad prices much lower.
Howdy folks, just chiming in with an idea (partially stolen from Dann and zArrowTan)
We've been experimenting a lot with a Discord server, and have managed to get it to a pretty good place to hopefully release early next week. We'll be entirely removing our onsite Chat and instead be moving everyone over to our Discord. We'll be embedding the #general channel into the homepage where the Chat used to be. The chat on the site will roughly look like this:
The main thing we've had to consider is how to handle the current situation around advertising and the relation they have to activity in the chat. It's something that we've thought a lot about and there are compelling arguments on both sides. Some say that since we're a marketplace it makes sense to allow them, and others say that since we're a marketplace it makes no sense to allow them since we already have forums that do that. The current problems we have with ads in Chat will be made significantly worse if nothing changes, since Discord doesn't have a maximum message length like our Chat has. This means people could post extremely long ad messages with images and obnoxious emojis every 20 minutes-- not good.
Fundamentally I think that chat ads are great, they allow people to advertise their content for free and are quite effective at getting interest from the community when done right. I believe that the problem isn't that chat ads are happening, but that they're happening too often to the point that they're stifling conversation from occurring. The solution I'm proposing is to only allow users to advertise who are actively chatting anyways. This would be done with a custom system very similar to the one used by Pebblehost in their discord.
Every minute that you're actively chatting or in a voice call in our Discord you're awarded between 15 and 25 coins added to your balance in Discord. Once you have accrued at least 500 coins you can then spend them on having an ad sent by using the /ads command to enter your ad. The ad will be sent in the #general channel along with people's messages. We'll limit your ads to only be a certain length and follow the same sort of policies that we currently have. Once you submit the ad, you'll have 500 coins deducted and it will be posted by our bot if it passes all our checks. An example of what an ad could look like is:
(sorry, I use light theme Discord)
The numbers I've proposed here haven't been considered in detail and the value of this system is that we would be able to tweak the numbers at any time to allow for more or fewer ads to be made if we feel the balance isn't right. Having this coins system could also allow us to add more fun things for users who engage in chat and gamify the experience a bit. Maybe a permanent profile medal that costs like 100,000 coins or a way to convert 5,000 coins into $2.50 of MC-Market Credits to give people other bonuses for engaging with us. Gamifying it a bit.
The number of ads would be directly correlated with the amount of discussion occurring, and you'd only get access to people's eyeballs if you're also contributing. We'd of course have to amend our policies to disallow advertising by sending messages and work out a clever way to phrase it that makes it clear about what is allowed and what isn't. That's going to be tricky to do, and the entire plan relies on us being able to do that. I'm imagining that I'd want it to say something like that you're allowed to discuss your projects and send links, but can't explicitly promote any products/services that you are affiliated with.
The biggest downside is the added moderation required to ensure that people aren't bypassing the system, but that's going to be the case with all of the moderation that we have to do anyways.
So what do we think?
We've been experimenting a lot with a Discord server, and have managed to get it to a pretty good place to hopefully release early next week. We'll be entirely removing our onsite Chat and instead be moving everyone over to our Discord. We'll be embedding the #general channel into the homepage where the Chat used to be. The chat on the site will roughly look like this:
The main thing we've had to consider is how to handle the current situation around advertising and the relation they have to activity in the chat. It's something that we've thought a lot about and there are compelling arguments on both sides. Some say that since we're a marketplace it makes sense to allow them, and others say that since we're a marketplace it makes no sense to allow them since we already have forums that do that. The current problems we have with ads in Chat will be made significantly worse if nothing changes, since Discord doesn't have a maximum message length like our Chat has. This means people could post extremely long ad messages with images and obnoxious emojis every 20 minutes-- not good.
Fundamentally I think that chat ads are great, they allow people to advertise their content for free and are quite effective at getting interest from the community when done right. I believe that the problem isn't that chat ads are happening, but that they're happening too often to the point that they're stifling conversation from occurring. The solution I'm proposing is to only allow users to advertise who are actively chatting anyways. This would be done with a custom system very similar to the one used by Pebblehost in their discord.
Every minute that you're actively chatting or in a voice call in our Discord you're awarded between 15 and 25 coins added to your balance in Discord. Once you have accrued at least 500 coins you can then spend them on having an ad sent by using the /ads command to enter your ad. The ad will be sent in the #general channel along with people's messages. We'll limit your ads to only be a certain length and follow the same sort of policies that we currently have. Once you submit the ad, you'll have 500 coins deducted and it will be posted by our bot if it passes all our checks. An example of what an ad could look like is:
(sorry, I use light theme Discord)
The numbers I've proposed here haven't been considered in detail and the value of this system is that we would be able to tweak the numbers at any time to allow for more or fewer ads to be made if we feel the balance isn't right. Having this coins system could also allow us to add more fun things for users who engage in chat and gamify the experience a bit. Maybe a permanent profile medal that costs like 100,000 coins or a way to convert 5,000 coins into $2.50 of MC-Market Credits to give people other bonuses for engaging with us. Gamifying it a bit.
The number of ads would be directly correlated with the amount of discussion occurring, and you'd only get access to people's eyeballs if you're also contributing. We'd of course have to amend our policies to disallow advertising by sending messages and work out a clever way to phrase it that makes it clear about what is allowed and what isn't. That's going to be tricky to do, and the entire plan relies on us being able to do that. I'm imagining that I'd want it to say something like that you're allowed to discuss your projects and send links, but can't explicitly promote any products/services that you are affiliated with.
The biggest downside is the added moderation required to ensure that people aren't bypassing the system, but that's going to be the case with all of the moderation that we have to do anyways.
So what do we think?
Great idea!
I'd advise you to read our rules: https://www.mc-market.org/wiki/rules
1.8 Do not post content which is extremely low in quality, irrelevant, redundant, unnecessary, or meaningless. (e.g: “Looks nice, GLWS”, “Vouch”)
This includes just random posts in order to farm points. This means participate in chat to accumulate points, meaning start conversations or provide feedback when necessary.
Regardless, posting random/non important stuff to gain points is discouraged.
