how to PROPERLY recommend an article

Ravenscroft

Banned
So, I was browsing this forum, idly curious about media coverage. Then I clicked on a particular link that sent me to a commercial website for a magazine. A totally gratuitous Chrome script (either a movement tracker or a paid ad placement) failed. This locked up my browser, forcing me to restart & costing me a post I'd been working on for another forum. Now Firefox is acting hinky; I'm doing a system restart & hoping for the best. Fortunately, I have another PC, but many people don't have that luxury.

So, though I've meant to raise this issue in the past, now seems highly appropriate. :mad:

Speaking as a recovering journalist, here are strong recommendations for good form & possibly for policy changes on Polyamory.com.

Foremost, if you are going to recommend something, then have the good graces to tell us WHY.

On other sites, people show up just long enough to make some sort of plug for their hobbyhorse-of-the-moment. You see it all the time on Amazon.com: "Good book." "Changed my life." "Everyone should read this." There are actually accounts that post these "reviews" because they get paid a few cents each (by the publisher or writer) to push the item higher in the Amazon rankings. It's not unlike Twitter accounts that exist only long enough to splodge out retweets from a particular person, group, or topic.

(Though there ARE "members" who show up here ONLY to push some event from which they profit, & steadfastly refuse to interact with anyone else except in that self-aggrandizing context. On other sites, I've seen such post in forums, only to drag every damned topic around to their little project. Here, the owners seem to feel that this distracting advertisement is "free speech" in the Citizens United sense; though I don't agree at all, site policy is site policy.)

While I don't believe that people here are intentionally acting like spambots, the fact remains that pushing a link to a site that profits directly from visitors makes the pusher responsible for any outfall. That means ANY erosion of individual privacy -- for instance, cookies & trackers & adware -- & (of course) any resultant malware.

In order to minimize this, I strongly recommend that site admins consider some policy tweaking, & in any case that people here who consider themselves members of a (virtual) community take on a little bit of responsibility.

If you truly believe that something is worth sharing, then SUMMARIZE it a little. Give us the "nickel tour." Post a few quotes.

And in the name of common decency, if a page takes a LONG time to load on your browser, then TELL US there's all sorts of ads & such shit we'd need to swallow.

If you're going to make such "must read" postings on a regular basis, then get your browser some privacy-scanner plugins, so that you can give us a heads-up. Amazon & eBay are really NOT good, but most magazines SUCK, hiding two or three DOZEN little nuggets of ick on your device so that they can sell your private info.

(FWIW, Polyamory.com is amazingly clean!! :) ZERO trackers or ads, & far as I can tell only remembers your current & immediately previous login time/date.)

There are people here who express anxiety about the possibility that they might be "outed." Yet here we are, glibly sending them to sites that will happily track their movements & infer their interests, hugely increasing the likelihood that the next time one of the kids (or maybe an unaware partner) uses the home PC to shop Amazon, all sorts of "You Might Also Like" stuff pops up with recommendations for poly, porn, & kink :(, & maybe Facebook visitors start getting similar hints.

Once more, with emphasis: TELL US WHY a book/article/site is interesting... or avoid the impulse.

And (IMNSHO) Admins really ought to establish a policy to either purge commercial plugs (intentional or not) or charge for them. Like any other social media, this site does bear some responsibility to point out stuff that's actually advertising or some other form of "fake news." For starters: a post with pretty much ZERO content other than a link to another site is kinda NOT a post.

Hey, here's a bit of irony: I finally got my laptop to restart... by disabling the tracker-block plugin for Firefox. :eek: Looks like that "big-name magazine" site's failed Chrome app was intentionally meant to hack around my little firewall, & instead fucked up the code. If anyone wants to know WHICH magazine, drop me a note. ;))
 
I like your idea of writing a little review of the site or article people are suggesting. The description under this forum only says to share links so I can't really fault people for doing only that.

I don't think it's reasonable to assume a poster is going to run a link through each and every browser before posting it here. Firefox? I haven't used that crappy browser in years. I've clicked on most of the articles posted here and haven't run into any problems.

Commercial links are removed from this site nearly every day. Posting a link to an article on poly from a site that has advertising is not spam.
 
I report obvious spam when I encounter it. (Red triangle top right of every post)

I usually click on all links recommended by posters I recognize - and have not run into the problems described (I use Chrome with AVG free, if that makes a difference). The "Press and Media Coverage" sub-forum is pretty much FOR such links/posts - so if the poster doesn't provide enough info for you, I would suggest NOT clicking.

PS. I have read pretty much every post since I joined in 2012 - and the only thing that has temporarily killed my computer is the Rum+Diet Coke I fed my laptop last year...I didn't even turn it off until the next day and it recovered just fine:eek: (My theory is the acid in the Coke cleaned the electrodes and the alcohol made the water evaporate that much faster:D).
 
I have posted a good number of the links on this section in recent months simply because they are poly related. Although the number of articles on poly is increasing, they are still relatively few enough that it seems that that the poly articles that are encountered may (and perhaps should) be appropriately posted here - as that seems to be the purpose of this section. Almost all of the links I have posted have come across my alt FB feed. Obviously some are better than others - but I believe the ones I have posted are worthwhile to varying degrees. I do not have time to offer a full fledged review of each one, but I do not think that should dissuade me from posting links to poly articles that might be useful to some. I have actually thought it to be a bit of "public service" so to speak.

I will say that because I run my alt FB account on Firefox and access this forum on Chrome - that all the links I have posted got checked on both Firefox and Chrome - with no software issues at all. I do agree that all the ads on some of these sites are annoying - but such, I guess, is the price of "free content". Best to all - Al
 
And (IMNSHO) Admins really ought to establish a policy to either purge commercial plugs (intentional or not) or charge for them.
This is already covered in the User Guidelines:
Any post containing non-poly-related commercial links will be deleted and the user who posted it will be banned as a spammer.
If you see something you believe is spam, report it using the
report.gif
button at the top of each post. Where there's possibility that it's unintentional we'll edit the post to remove the link and issue the poster with a warning, but where it's blatant spam we'll just ban, delete, and move on. If the material being advertised is relevant to poly - ie a new book or an upcoming conference, then it will be allowed to remain unless the post is objectionable in some other way (being covered in embedded porn gifs would do it, and you really don't want to know how many of them we delete every day).


Foremost, if you are going to recommend something, then have the good graces to tell us WHY.
I generally post a quote from the article, eg:

Victoria Police officers' pants splitting due to poor quality, union says
Victorian police officers have called for new pants after reporting their current uniforms are splitting at the crotch when they are trying to arrest people.

Police Association Victoria secretary Wayne Gatt said members had reported poor-quality and ill-fitting pants.

"The material used in manufacturing the pants is particularly unpopular with members, who have advised that the material does not breathe, and that the pants cause excessive sweating particularly in summer," he said.

... but that won't protect you if I'm maliciously linking to malware, so it's up to you to take what measures you feel are necessary to protect your hardware and data before choosing to click on it. If you feel the risk outweighs the benefit then don't do it.
 
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