Glad to see we are on the same page, and thanks so much for the explaination.Breanni wrote:I've never been a fan of censorship.
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At the very least, you're owed a more detailed explanation.
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I personally spent weeks monitoring the forums.
Perhaps there is a way to rephrase the guidelines somewhat to make it ok to established members of the community to link. I think it is MMO-champion who uses a feature were you can't link unless you have posted 5 or 10 posts or something. Making it a requirement to contribute to the community could reward the ability to link. And if there are users who obviously abuse linking like you described above, mention it in the guidelines so you have the right to freeze / ban that useraccount. That way the spammers will have to work to get the linking rights, and if they abuse it, they have to work again..or you could potentially ban the IP adress, but I have heard bad things about IP banning(can't rem why at the moment).Breanni wrote:The final decision came about largely as the result of the actions taken by the site developers. These actions include using our forums SOLELY* as a venue to:
A.) Promote links to content on their own site when the same information is available on ours;
EXAMPLE: Linking to a pet profile on their site instead of linking to the same profile on our site.
B.) Seek feedback to develop their own site, rather than providing feedback to us to help us improve WarcraftPets;
C.) Generate a series of permanent links to unique content on their site while publicly planning to add many features that are currently exclusive to WarcraftPets.
*When I say SOLELY above, it means that ALL forum posts by these individuals (prior to having their links removed or replaced) had either provided links to their own sites or followed up on such posts. There was no history of these individuals using our forums for anything otherwise.
So these repeated actions put us in an awkward position.
I know it can be very hard to monitor active forums to avoid spam, and the worst kind is the personalized spam where an actual person sits there with purely one agenda, avoid detection and get the word out about his/her site. I do hope you find a better solution than competitor-link-repleacement. I have gotten PMs the last few days about what site I were talking about somewhere in here, so I'd have to give them the link privately(edit: mind you, I am not affiliated with any sites, I'm just pointing them towards helpful resources), which gets them the help they needed, but I don't think it's the best solution.
Best of luck!Breanni wrote:we'll be reviewing this decision in the days ahead. It was never our intention to stifle your voice or limit access to useful information. Our goal has always been to make WarcraftPets the most valuable website of its kind.
I have grown to love this site, and it is very nice to see you listening to feedback. (and so sorry for being sooooo very off topic in this thread)
