Um,
Amazon dumb links now change to affiliate links for this forum...
I think this is an awesome idea as I want to support this forum any way I can. I try to advertise for it, bring members on, buy swag, and send monthly payments. This forum is so good I don't even go anywhere else anymore.
But the Congressional level of dishonesty and hypocrisy over this issue is making my head spin...
It was one of the options mooted in the
discussion thread, and the only solution with a readily-available implementation:
No objections were raised at the time (5 months ago) but an announcement that it was going live would be nice.
Although
@EdZ correctly points out that we discussed the implementation of auto-referral links publicly a while time ago, I think that
@Josh | NFC 's perspective is entirely reasonable. We disagree on some things, but that doesn't mean we find the point of view unreasonable. At it's face, banning referral links and then using our own to enforce the ban sounds pretty darn hypocritical, at least to some. I can't - and won't - argue otherwise.
This has actually been a helpful reminder to revisit having made this change. We haven't really done that yet, given our efforts to backfill James, to be honest. Now that we've had a minute, though, I will say that there are a few things we should have done better:
- We should have been louder about the fact that we were implementing short-URL blocking and affiliate codes, when we did it.
- We should have posted notices about the implementation of these in a conspicuous place (use of affiliate codes is covered by our ethics policy, but this not necessarily an obvious place to look for it).
Given this, I've gone ahead and made a few updates. The first is a clarification on our Ethics statement about the role of affiliate links and the separation of editorial
and moderation from our use of those (
emphasis is what has changed):
ORIGINAL:
Our projects and sites may contain affiliate marketing links, which pay commissions on sales of those products or services we write about. Those links are generated independently of editorial, and our editorial content is not influenced by advertisers or affiliate partnerships.
UPDATED:
Our projects and sites may contain affiliate marketing links, which pay commissions on sales of those products or services that we link to. Those links are generated independently of editorial or moderation, and our editorial content and moderation decisions are not influenced by advertisers or affiliate partnerships.
The second is an update to the Rules, to call out our ban on shortened URL's (
emphasis is what has changed):
ORIGINAL:
Rules
In addition to the
Terms of Use here are some additional rules:
- In general, use common sense and show courtesy to your fellow members
- Don't post links that contain referral codes
- Do post in English
- Personal attacks will NOT be tolerated
UPDATED:
Rules
In addition to the
Terms of Use here are some additional rules:
- In general, use common sense and show courtesy to your fellow members
- Don't post links that are shortened or contain referral codes
- Do post in English
- Personal attacks will NOT be tolerated
The last is the addition of a succinct, no-nonsence disclosure that we have implemented affiliate codes on SFF Forum:
Affiliate Links
SFF Forum automatically updates certain e-commerce links (such as Amazon links) across the forum to use a referral code. We do this to help enforce our ban on referral links (since we overwrite those posted by users), as well as to financially support the forum.
Hopefully these will do a good job of making this apparent, transparent, and honest. And as always, we want discussion of this, our policies, and anything else to be an ongoing concern, as it's important and actually does affect change in how we do things.
