Icon and Aerodyne links in posts

[bob.dino 0]

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I could be pointing out a flaw in a manufacturer's product and your advertising will change that into a possible endorsement.

No it doesn't. It changes it to a link where users can read more about the product that you think is flawed. I trust your post will make it very clear that you're not endorsing the product.

If there is no distinction between a link that I create and a link that you add to my post, then there's no way for the user to tell if I intended to link that product. Longtime users will learn never to click on the name of a product and new users will just be confused.

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It's really not the big deal you're trying to make this out to be.

I beg to differ; it crosses a very important line in that it turns editorial content into paid advertising.

If each post that mentioned an Aerodyne product had a little ad at the side for the product, I'd have no problem. Let me repeat: ads are not the problem. Ads pretending to be editorial content are the problem.

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...to see how I can ensure that this doesn't become a usability drag or create too much confusion, while still remaining fair to everyone involved.

I'll wait.

[MakeItHappen 15]

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The links don't bother me. As with everything else on this site, you don't have to open them, just keep reading.

Your comment really bothers me.

The thing is that I post links to my material or others within the context of a post or as FMI list.

The reason I post like that vs 'copy and paste' is because the material is copyrighted.

I've asked Sangiro several times to remove my copyrighted material from others' posts.

Now, if you add in some keyword linking scheme, based on the highest bidder, these posts would refer people to pages that may or may not have anything to do with the original post.

I think in the long run you'll end up having people write their spiel, post it on their site and then link to it so that no keywords are posted in the DZ.com post. Or maybe a double substitution eg Containers Icon

left bracket url "http://www.makeithappen.com/spsj" right bracket Containers Icon left bracket /url right bracket

This turns into a double link. Containers goes to the intended destination. Icon goes someplace else.
User-friendly? I don't think so.


Web based writing removed pronouns from product descriptions.
This key word linking will remove content from posts. It will be replaced by links to 'content under my control'.

DZ.com would become a big linked list is all.

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Make It Happen
Parachute History
DiveMaker

[Joellercoaster 6]

Icon.

--
"I'll tell you how all skydivers are judged, . They are judged by the laws of physics." - kkeenan

"You jump out, pull the string and either live or die. What's there to be good at?

[skymama 35]

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I think in the long run you'll end up having people write their spiel, post it on their site and then link to it so that no keywords are posted in the DZ.com post. Or maybe a double substitution eg Containers Icon

Good Lord. I guess people have more time on their hands than I do, are more high maintenance or get easily bothered by the little things in life. To me, in the big scheme of things, none of this really matters enough to get my panties in a wad over. Life's too short.

The entire time this site has been online, my friend Willem has bent over backwards to try to make it less commercial than other web sites out there. If he is having to add this feature, then I trust his judgment that this is what is necessary to be able to keep this website online for his friends and the skydiving community while still keeping it a quality website. Nothing he ever does is a rash decision.

I see a bunch of people complaining, but I don't really see anyone coming up with a better way for him to cover his expenses and make a living from providing this website for us. Don't be part of the problem, be part of the solution.

She is Da Man, and you better not mess with Da Man,
because she will lay some keepdown on you faster than, well, really fast. ~Billvon

[MakeItHappen 15]

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I think in the long run you'll end up having people write their spiel, post it on their site and then link to it so that no keywords are posted in the DZ.com post. Or maybe a double substitution eg Containers Icon

Good Lord. I guess people have more time on their hands than I do, are more high maintenance or get easily bothered by the little things in life. To me, in the big scheme of things, none of this really matters enough to get my panties in a wad over. Life's too short.

The entire time this site has been online, my friend Willem has bent over backwards to try to make it less commercial than other web sites out there. If he is having to add this feature, then I trust his judgment that this is what is necessary to be able to keep this website online for his friends and the skydiving community while still keeping it a quality website. Nothing he ever does is a rash decision.

I see a bunch of people complaining, but I don't really see anyone coming up with a better way for him to cover his expenses and make a living from providing this website for us. Don't be part of the problem, be part of the solution.

You know what... skydiving and skydivers do not owe Sangiro a living.

I've made lots of info available for free - only to see it stolen and posted here.
That pisses me off a lot. So much so that everything is going into print media and not online, even though the better information dissemination route is online.
The good news is that Sangiro takes it off the site - when I mention it to him.
But I don't read every thread and don't know of every copyright violation.

what you are basically saying is that, since Sangiro can't (or won't) make money the way other sites do, will you please allow this transgression upon your posts to feed him?

Sorry, but content spamming is a big no-no in my book.

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Make It Happen
Parachute History
DiveMaker

[pilotdave 0]

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I see a bunch of people complaining, but I don't really see anyone coming up with a better way for him to cover his expenses and make a living from providing this website for us.

Has he considered selling drugs? I hear it's a growing business.

Seriously though, I agree with you. On my site, I've added "I'm a tool but..." before each comment that someone made cause I thought he was being an idiot. Adding some links to a few manufacturers (only one so far) isn't the end of the world and it doesn't change the meaning of a post. I think it'd be nice if those links were marked, and of course the bugs need to be worked out, but this just doesn't matter much. If companies could buy ANY word, it would get out of hand. But a few product/company names is no big deal.

Dave

[pilotdave 0]

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Sorry, but content link spamming is a big no-no in my book.

How much will your book cost?

Dave

[MakeItHappen 15]

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Sorry, but content link spamming is a big no-no in my book.

How much will your book cost?

Dave

Around $19.95
That does include freedom to say what you want without links to paid advertizers.

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Make It Happen
Parachute History
DiveMaker

[NtheSeaOrSky 0]

Some of the bigger picture:
-the more traffic on the site, the better the incentive for advertisers
-with traffic comes noise
-'buying' a keyword is roughly the same as 7 premiere memberships per month
-sometimes we miss the forest for the trees

edited for spelling



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Life is not fair and there are no guarantees...

[Nightingale 0]

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I see a bunch of people complaining, but I don't really see anyone coming up with a better way for him to cover his expenses and make a living from providing this website for us. Don't be part of the problem, be part of the solution.

Give people the option of how they want to support the site. Give premiere members the option of disabling keywords. There aren't a ton of premiere members in comparison to the number of people who use this site (not even counting all the lurkers that haven't registered).

[bob.dino 0]

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I see a bunch of people complaining, but I don't really see anyone coming up with a better way for him to cover his expenses and make a living from providing this website for us. Don't be part of the problem, be part of the solution.

My part of the solution is giving him USD 100 a year. I've contributed money to three of the four community sites that have been a major part of my life. Only on dz.com do I still have to read ads. That I can live with. This I find too intrusive.

I'm happy to spend my time on an advertising-supported site. I'm just not happy to also separately fund it once I feel that the advertising gets in the way of the information I come to this site to obtain.

Anyway, I've beaten this horse to death, so I'll bow out now and wait to see what happens.

[TomAiello 25]

If you're working out a way to sort out the times that the string appears inside another word (what shall henceforth be referred to as "the emoticon case") you might consider working that functionality back into the classifieds notifications, too. I've got a classified notification for a BASE canopy (the Ace) and about 75% of the hits are false positives (most comonly for rAcer containers).

-- Tom Aiello

[email protected]
SnakeRiverBASE.com

[TomAiello 25]

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Give people the option of how they want to support the site. Give premiere members the option of disabling keywords.

What if they could be disabled in a premier members view of the forum (like the way you can turn signatures on and off, but only available to premier members)?

That would add value to premier membership, and also give people a way to put their money where their mouth is.

-- Tom Aiello

[email protected]
SnakeRiverBASE.com

[diablopilot 2]

I'd buy that.


Edit: Clarification, if it meant that any posts I make wouldn't have any hyperlinks in them that I didn't place there. I don't mind seeing the links in others posts, but I really don't want my words to be abused.

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You're not as good as you think you are. Seriously.

[AggieDave 6]

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What if they could be disabled in a premier members view of the forum (like the way you can turn signatures on and off, but only available to premier members)?

Well typically on the internet forum type sites, if there is a pay membership option, that option removes all or most advertisements from the site for those users. That is what is typically done and is expected by many people on the internet.

--"When I die, may I be surrounded by scattered chrome and burning gasoline."

[Nightingale 0]

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Give people the option of how they want to support the site. Give premiere members the option of disabling keywords.

What if they could be disabled in a premier members view of the forum (like the way you can turn signatures on and off, but only available to premier members)?

That would add value to premier membership, and also give people a way to put their money where their mouth is.

It seems like seeing the ads aren't the problem... it's that people don't want ads placed in their posts, because there's no way to tell whether it was a product endorsement or an artificially added link. Allowing premiere members to disable seeing these links wouldn't change that the links are included in those users' posts anyway.

[Joellercoaster 6]

Two things come from this thread, one for me and one for people having broken-link issues.

First, I use DZ.com an awful lot, get a lot out of it and have never paid a cent. Time to upgrade my membership.

Second, any content-subsitution scheme can be beaten. It can turn into an arms race, but if you really don't want your Icon turning into Icon, then you can get around it. Unicode literals, markup tricks... I'd bet if you went to that effort to ensure your content got presented the way you wanted, sangiro et al wouldn't go out of their way to mess with you.

--
"I'll tell you how all skydivers are judged, . They are judged by the laws of physics." - kkeenan

"You jump out, pull the string and either live or die. What's there to be good at?

[MrBrant 0]

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I've got a classified notification for a BASE canopy (the Ace) and about 75% of the hits are false positives (most comonly for rAcer containers).

Although this could be a good idea - however sometimes people would search for "sabre" or "sabre 2", but with the ad listed as a "sabre2"

[dragon2 0]

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I've got a classified notification for a BASE canopy (the Ace) and about 75% of the hits are false positives (most comonly for rAcer containers).

Although this could be a good idea - however sometimes people would search for "sabre" or "sabre 2", but with the ad listed as a "sabre2"

It's even worse: I usually search for "spect" "sab" "veng" "tri" etc because people can't spell!

ciel bleu,
Saskia

[Eule 0]

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Matching patterns will indeed go a long way to solving the problem stated above. It doesn't
solve the problem of out of context links though.

I was mostly thinking of solving the substring or "emoticon" problem. I agree that trying to look at the
context and trying to figure out if a pilot is a canopy or a guy that can fly a plane is a more difficult
proposition. You could probably develop some heuristics that would get you halfway there, but you could
spend the rest of your life (and your CPU cycles) trying to get it 100%. What I'm thinking of is a rule
like: post contains "pilot" AND ("cessna" or "182" or "otter" or "pac") --> no link; post contains "pilot"
AND ("riser" OR "steering" OR "canopy") --> link. Or, perhaps some kind of scoring system could be
done, with links only being inserted when the score rises above a certain threshold.

I don't know what your MRTG graphs look like, so this may be a bold suggestion. It seems to me,
though, that the link insertion happens after the user clicks "post message" and before the post gets
committed to the database and indexed in the forum. Given that, and that "view post" is probably a
much more common occurence than "submit post", you can afford to spend a moderate amount of CPU
analyzing the post and deciding whether to link a certain word or not.

Alll of the above refers to the technical details of making the link insertion work in an acceptable way,
and doesn't answer the question of whether the link insertion is a good idea or not. My opinon on the
link insertion follows.

I've sat on both sides of this table. I've been a volunteer admin for an enthusiast Web site. Somebody
posted a video clip to our photo gallery which then got slashdotted. It took us a while to catch it and it
turned out our connection was not throttled like our ISP said it was. Result: Our normal ~US$100
phone bill turned into over US$2000, which we had to come up with. So I'm a bit acquainted with the
idea of having to fund a Web site.

On the other hand, I do have somewhat of an objection to a post that I write (and retain the copyright
on) getting turned into advertising for a third party. As has been discussed, there are technical ways
around this. Also, the terms and conditions seem to be written to allow for the link insertion:

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(I) By publishing or submitting any content including, articles, stories, postings and photographs
to any part of Dropzone.com you give permission that such content may be used at the sole discretion
of Dropzone.com anywhere else on the site, for any purpose, in its original or edited form, at any
time in the future.

Emphasis mine. It could be argued that adding the links is "editing" and is therefore covered under the
existing agreement. On the other hand, the next sentence is

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Content will not be sold without permission of the original author or owner.

and it could be argued that adding advertising links is "selling" content.

I am aware that one sure-fire way to not have my posts edited is to not make them, also known as the
"if you don't like it here, then leave" option.

As sort of a meta-observation, I would bet that many of the people who object to the link insertion are
people that have had Internet access since before the Web became popular. When we had to walk uphill
in the snow both ways to use a VT100 at 1200 baud, there was a mild anti-commercial bias on the net -
it was for sharing information and ideas, not for selling things. On the other hand, people that grew
up with Netscape and think that all computers have mice are used to the idea of ads being everywhere,
and are probably less likely to object to this.

This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire 

civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands 

of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.


Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this? [ny]

Eule

PLF does not stand for Please Land on Face.

[Remster 24]

Nice new markup look on the keywords Willem!

Remster

[MakeItHappen 15]

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Nice new markup look on the keywords Willem!

It looks different, but yet is still confusing to a reader.

I can say Containers Icon where "Containers Icon" is linked to what I want it to be.
But what happens is a double link substitution. Only the Containers word is linked to where I want it to go.

Also, the REs used do not account for whole word matches. That's not rocket science. Only a simple text match is used in the RE. So you still have the Emoticon problem.

Content spamming is bad for everyone.

What might be better is to list some sponsored links at the end of a post based on the keywords contained in the post.

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Make It Happen
Parachute History
DiveMaker

[SkyDekker 1,122]

I find it very intrusive, much more so than any banner ad or "skyscraper" ad. It makes it a lot more personal, specially since it automatically "alters" the text a forum user types.

Makes me wonder what will happen when there area couple of accidents with ill made product from Aerodyne. Will it automatically alter the text in the posting in the incident forum?

You ahve already sold the words used by posters, not a big stretch to sell the meaning of it as well.

To me, content of the site has taken a hit in the credibility department.

[diablopilot 2]

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What might be better is to list some sponsored links at the end of a post based on the keywords contained in the post.

Perfect. Much like G-mail does.

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You're not as good as you think you are. Seriously.

[bob.dino 0]

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What might be better is to list some sponsored links at the end of a post based on the keywords contained in the post.

That would work for me too; I think I suggested putting them to the right of the post.