"Links policy" means what to us regulars here??

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by apesmom

Sure, no problem, I'm going to dig through every URL looking for that string, remove it and check to see that the link still works correctly. NOT.

That is of course your choice. You said "I didn't even know what to look for"; I was advising you what to look for. Whether or not you choose to do so is, it goes without saying, entirely your decision to make.

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by HarryT

That is of course your choice. You said "I didn't even know what to look for"; I was advising you what to look for. Whether or not you choose to do so is, it goes without saying, entirely your decision to make.

That's true, but I think Apesmom has a point that this isn't The Greedy Busterds versus The Altruistic Angels. A lot of people who were previously posting aren't going to be TECH SAVVY enough to scrub the links they find elsewhere. And as those posts are shut down, they'll probably give up trying.

And how this will solve the problem of "over worked moderators" I cannot imagine since now you have to shut down people who use Inkmesh links, not realizing they are affiliated. *I* didn't even know Inkmesh links were affiliated.

(It will, of course, solve the "people making money off the moderators' time" problem. So it's not a total loss for the problems that PilotBob referenced.)

[cromag]

Originally Posted by Catlady

...
So whereas before I had to simply skim the titles in the deals posts to find possible titles of interest, now I have to also open each individual affiliate thread.
...

I agree. It's a lot less convenient to find individual titles. Not to be too confrontational, but this seems to have been a solution to something that was never a problem for me.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by apesmom

Yeah well you would think, but I just got a post deleted for posting a link I found on Slickdeals. Sorry, I didn't scrub the URL but I didn't even know what I was looking for. Suddenly not feeling very helpful anymore.

I'm sorry your post got deleted, especially in what looks like an upsetting manner.

Perhaps the mods might like to consider adding some "How to Recognize and Remove an Affiliate Link" tips to go with the new rules?

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

I'm sorry your post got deleted, especially in what looks like an upsetting manner.

Perhaps the mods might like to consider adding some "How to Recognize and Remove an Affiliate Link" tips to go with the new rules?

Since the Standard Moderation Announcement that was posted in Apemoms thread quite tersely called the OP a liar, apparently the moderation policy is to assume that anyone who posts an affiliate link already knows what they are and precisely how to scrub them.

I agree that a sticky on scrubbing links would be VERY useful. But if I am reading Koland correctly, it would seem it would not be that easy. The "Nook Daily Deal" thread in this forum has 3 links, two of which seem to have a "ref" or "tag" on the end. Are they affiliate links? Is that innocent info that B&N needs to find the product? I honestly don't know.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

I agree that a sticky on scrubbing links would be VERY useful. But if I am reading Koland correctly, it would seem it would not be that easy.

In which case, the mods also need both a clear "how to handle possible affiliate links from unfamiliar posters" policy to respond with, and an "if you're not sure whether you're posting an affiliate, please follow these steps" guideline for said posters.

Personally, I'd propose a standard formula cut-and-paste text like:

Thank you for sharing your deal.

Unfortunately, the link you have given seems to be an affiliate link, which is against MobileRead policy regarding commercial use of our forums.

I have deleted the URL from your post in accordance with MobileRead policy.

If you are able to find a version of the link without the affiliate information or another poster is able to supply one, please feel free to re-post the clean URL in a new post below in this same thread.

If you are uncertain as to what an affiliate link is or how to remove the affiliate information, please see INFO POST HERE.

And then the mods could just leave the text of the deal intact, sans link, which should hopefully still have enough info that other people can find the deal without it.

That would give inexperienced deal-sharers the benefit of the doubt, and if it turns out that later the poster came back to re-edit in the same affiliate link, then the mods now know to ban them for attempted stealth link-spam.

Of course, this should be accompanied by a similar standard disclaimer formula to protect well-meaning posters. Something along the lines of:

What To Do If You're Not Sure If You Might Be Posting An Affiliate Link

1) Indicate at the top of the post whichever website originally led you to the deal and state that you got this link from there and don't know if it contains an affiliate. Ask your fellow MR posters to look at it and if they can, post a clean version of the URL in response to your thread, which you will edit back into the OP should it be necessary.

2) Provide as much detail about what the deal is, the author/title/publisher/price etc., the shopping/other site where it can be found, as you can so that in case your original link needs to be deleted, your fellow MR members can still find the deal on their own with a little Googling.

Having a clear set of guidelines which addresses both sides of the new link-posting/link-deletion equation and What To Do Next would be very useful to both the mods who have to look after this forum, and the deal-sharers looking into it, I should think.

[anamardoll]

ATDrake, that all seems perfectly reasonable to me.

I will be interested to learn how to scrub links from all these different sources. Looking around, they're all not as simple as a tag on the end. I've seen urls with tags that are in the middle of a HUGE link. Can everything after the tag be deleted safely? I honestly don't know.

[ATDrake]

Rule of thumb is that if you can lop off the back end of a link and copy paste the modified url into a new browser window and still wind up at the same product page, then yes.

Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and Sony links all follow a fairly standard format for the individual ebooks at least and later today I'll try and post a miniguide for what clean links for those look like and how to make them if the one you found has cruft.

(Unfortunately I'm on the bus to a field trip at the moment and posting on an actual Kindle is more involved than I thought otherwise I'd do it right now.

I blame any and all typos in this post on the Kindle. They make the keyboard for midget fingers.)

[Catlady]

Let's back up here. Wasn't the main reason for the policy change to reduce the workload for the moderators?

And now they need to inspect and verify every damn link for some evil affiliate tag ... that reduces workload how? And what about links in, say, Reading Recommendations, or in any of the device forums? There may be a forbidden affiliate link somewhere! Must root it out!

This is a poorly thought-out and, so far, poorly implemented policy (an accusation of lying was uncalled-for). It certainly reduces one's desire to be helpful when one is afraid of being publicly chastised for a mistake.

[ScalyFreak]

In fairness, we don't know if the workload that was reduced was looking over actual posts, or if the moderators were drowning in reports about affiliate links? If the first come, first serve approach led to 6 reports per post or more along the lines of "I already posted that!" and the moderators had to clean out those reports, send PMs, and lock threads, that part of the work should now be gone.

EDIT:
I volunteer my time acting as a moderator in a forum community in another corner of the internet. We have a handful of users who consistently report every single post by one specific user, out of spite. They clog up our queue with invalid reports simply because they don't like this person, and make it very hard for us to deal with valid reports. Since we have a strict zero-tolerance policy on harassment we are of course taking steps to deal with this, but its a slow process, and in the mean time we have four times as much work as we did before these jerks started their personal vendetta against someone whose opinion they disagree with. If I could perma-ban them all I would, just to make our job easier.

If something similar to that was happening, I can fully understand a desire to change the policy and posting rules for affiliate links,

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by ScalyFreak

In fairness, we don't know if the workload that was reduced was looking over actual posts, or if the moderators were drowning in reports about affiliate links? If the first come, first serve approach led to 6 reports per post or more along the lines of "I already posted that!" and the moderators had to clean out those reports, send PMs, and lock threads, that part of the work should now be gone.

The prize goes to Mr. ScalyFreak. Got it in one.

[Catlady]

The other choice would have been to allow duplication, then.

After all, there's duplication now, too. I've seen some book titles posted as many as three times--in and out of the affiliate threads.

[ScalyFreak]

Originally Posted by Catlady

After all, there's duplication now, too. I've seen some book titles posted as many as three times--in and out of the affiliate threads.

But they no longer generate a dozen or more reports per duplicate, and that was the real problem.

[koland]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

ATDrake, that all seems perfectly reasonable to me.

I will be interested to learn how to scrub links from all these different sources. Looking around, they're all not as simple as a tag on the end. I've seen urls with tags that are in the middle of a HUGE link. Can everything after the tag be deleted safely? I honestly don't know.

Links can be at the end (safely lopped off), in the middle (may or may not break the link) or embedded in such a way that it's near impossible to remove (I've seen this in people who use an API call as their link and in some of the google stuff, where the link is a redirect, with the amazon info embedded where it is a pain to pull out.

With some links, all you have is a redirect (kobo, some types of B&N and iTunes links, etc). Once the redirect is expanded, there may or may not be additional affiliate info at the end (the daily link in arcdata's thread is an example of this).

[Blossom]

What we need is someone to make a program or some kind of script page that cleans the links automatically so people can fill freely to share things they have found. Not everyone is tech saavy. As someone who use to help out novice users such a seniors learning. It's not always simple to explain to them these things. It took me just 3 hours to teach my mother in law how to copy and paste a link in facebook