This idea sprang from the ongoing
Can self-promotion go to far? thread in the
General Discussion area...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vintage Season
All right, here is an idea:
What if every new thread in Author Self-Promotions also allowed the author to include a single thumbnail cover image for their book, to be put into random rotation in a forum header strip (showcasing perhaps half a dozen titles at a time), so that if someone saw an interesting cover, they could click on that cover and be taken to the relevant link?
A few caveats would have to be enforced: - There would be a simple way for users who didn't want to see the header strip to turn it off, from within the User CP.
- The rotation would be random, but thorough. No repetition would occur until every thumbnail in the random queue had been displayed, at which point the queue would be re-randomized and the process would begin afresh.
- An author could only start one thread per title. (This would also encourage authors to start a new thread if they had a new title.)
- Any author determined to be gratuitously bumping his/her own thread would not only lose the image and link for the title(s) they bumped, but be banned from adding any future thumbnails for the banner rotation, until and unless they could satisfy the moderators that the bumping pattern was a non-aggressive newbie mistake, never to be repeated on these forums.
- M. |
I should probably note that I merely threw this out as a hypothetical solution, without any deeper analysis of the probable effort its implementation would entail. Feel free to discuss, ridicule or shred the idea... or to put it into practice, if enough people seem to think it is a good one, and there is a practical way to do so.
- M.