Referral Regulations

Proposal

Referrals: Posting referral links anywhere other than in your signature or user title. This includes referral links for sites, surveys, other games, Share-cash, etc.

The above information was taken from the Sythe.org Membership Rules.

I'm proposing we change this rule to:

Referrals: Posting referral links without quality content to support the redirect. This includes any link that ruins the community's user experience.

If someone could create a better way to phrase the rule, please make a suggestion.


Change Request Explanation

After speaking to a few staff members, I found that the rule is actively enforced to prevent the spam of unwanted advertisements and referral links. It would be a horrible user experience to find these all over the website.

On the other hand, there should be a line between inappropriate and acceptable referral links. You will find people all around the website linking users to Amazon and useful resources because the original post is requesting information about a product. That is acceptable if someone is seeking assistance from the community.

People who have an affiliation with Amazon can quickly setup the hyperlink with their membership code to receive profit from their contribution. All over the web you will find bloggers and niche websites that do this. There is zero reason to prevent users from providing excellent content on Sythe and receive profit for their contribution. It is a win-win situation for both the users making the request and the members willing to spend their time fulfilling the request.

The affiliation link doesn't increase the cost of the products, but Amazon will pay a portion of their profit to the affiliate.

I think this would remove some restrictions I'm seeing on the current ruling, and would encourage writers or bloggers to contribute content that will optimize the website for search engines and help the community stay active.

Overall, I don't see any harm coming out of this. It would only be an improvement; thus I hope you guys support the idea.

 

But what defines quality content? I can only see this as a grey area type of rule. No one likes referral links and most people only use them if they're looking up like top bla bla thing I want to buy on Amazon then click the link because they're lazy and don't know they're taking away from our Amazon overlords.

I know there's something you want to do specifically... why not just say what it is? I can't imagine you're posting Amazon referrals links on Sythe... but I'd support something for whitelisted sites such as Amazon and... Amazon? Edit: Actually, that's a grey area too.

 

Quality content is when you're not posting just a link without further information regarding the product. It is not a gray area. There is as clear distinction between someone posting spam and not posting spam.

There isn't a reason for anyone to dislike referral links. What is your problem with it? Is there a specific reason that you don't like using them? If someone is spending their time to research you content, then why do you care if you use their referral link? I believe it's important to use logic when discussing regulations for the website.