Sale adverts in weblogs

Hey there. I'm probably going to get thumped for this, but what they hell. Is there any way we can deal with the rash of sale advertsiements in the weblog headers? I don't mind if someone writes a blog entry and happens to mention that they have something for sale(guilty of that myself), but to dedicate an entire entry to it seems a little off to me(and an endrun around posting in the forum in order to get your sale on the front page). It just smacks of Animanga a little too much to me. We have a forum dedicated to sales, and that is where these posts should go. I am not calling anyone out or singling out a collector, I just think this needs to be addressed. OK, proceed to thump me at your leisure.

I don't know if there's any way to fix that, as the blogs aren't really monitered per se, and there aren't really any rules out set for them.

The other type of blog I don't like is the ones that tell you what people have updated. Isn't that what the "News" section is for? Granted, it probably keeps your gallery on the home page for longer, so you get more hits, but whatever.

I hope everyone now sees why we were and always have been tough on allowing people to sell things on their websites.

Obviously, we have to do something. This is why we disallowed even saying the word "sale" for the longest time. The natural progression of things is the whole give an inch take a yard type of thing.

The real problem here is that some people like using an area we've said time and again is for personal galleries for free advertising. Most other sites that operate like this one don't list updates for *this very reason*.

So, I propose letting people do mentions of sales or whatever as they do currently -- again, no direct sales from websites -- we'll just exclude them from any home page update listings for at least a month. The sites will still work, they just won't work for free advertising.

Maybe we can solve the angry yelling people problem this way as well. They won't be banned, we just won't amplify their voices.

For now, weblog updates on the home page will be disabled. We'll put them back later. Please discuss.

Works for me. I just didn't want the front page becoming Animanga, where every post was about a sale or a flamewar. There are areas for announcing updates, announcing sales, asking questions, etc. It should stay that way. I will still check the blogs of my favorite users, and I hope this little break will help calm things down.

I do agree that when people update solely to announce a sale, it seems rather shallow (although I, myself, am guilty of this). And although this may seem rather ludicrous, it's possible that some folks don't know the existence of the potential forums to post in (like Animanga or Anime-Beta). It took me a few months after I created my account to figure out that Animanga existed, and about 6 months to find Anime-Beta. So we shouldn't be too harsh on folks.

As for taking the blogs off the front page...

Well, while some folks were definitely stirring up trouble and making posts that were more appropriate for something like livejournal, I must say that more often than not, reading someone's entry made me realize that I'd missed their most recent update. Newly updated galleries get moved off the front page as quickly as 30 minutes sometimes, so it's very possible that you'd miss a great update if the owner didn't mention it in their blog. I know that with my crappy dial-up, it's very difficult for me to load the seperate Recently Updated page.

Perhaps, since this entire site is dedicated to animation, we could make some rule that limits blog entries to this specific subject. If people want to complain about their personal lives, let them get a FREE livejournal account and leave the rest of us alone.

Just my 2 cents.