Bud_Bent
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I get up early most mornings, and one of the first things I do is check the forum, and delete any spam ads that were posted overnight. This morning, though, I had to think twice about the ads from a new member that I found, because they were bicycle related. In the end, I deleted the ads because: (1) One ad wasn't in the Marketplace forum. (2) The ads, which were for a supposed bike store, didn't link to a legitimate store website (or any website, for that matter). (3) The email addresses were all hotmail, gmail, and yahoo, rather than the kind of email address you would expect for a real store. It got me to thinking that I probably need to post a sticky with guidelines and a disclaimer in the Marketplace forum, and there are several questions that arise. Even if this morning's poster was an upstanding store, do we want commercial advertising on the forum? If so, do we restrict the size of ads, or allow giant size ads like this morning's ads were? Do we only allow ads from store people that some of us know, stores in this area, or do we just ban all store ads? My initial thought is that we don't want commercial ads at all. I like the setup we've had, where forum members post either their own stuff, or other stuff they think might interest members (store stuff they've seen, or links to ads in other places). But we do have some rbent friendly merchants in the area, and there are some real bargains to be found on online stores. I've used cheap hosting and free forum software, so we don't need money from advertising to support the forum. So do we ban all commercial ads? I'd like to hear other forum members' thoughts on this.
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