Allowing readers to post their referral links on dedicated posts has long been the bane of my existence. There is a small minority of readers that has decided that taking advantage of this and posting their links multiple times under different e-mail addresses and usernames is a good use of their time. Some readers decide to share their links where ever they want. This is a warning to all readers that you need to do the following:
- Only post your links once per household, sorry no multiples.
- Make sure you follow the rules in each individual posts and only post your referral links in posts that specifically state it’s allowed
- Don’t offer any form of incentive for using your referral links. It would be great if this worked, but in practice it doesn’t as it’s impossible to police and we end up with both parties saying they didn’t get what’s promised.
If readers continue to abuse these rules we will be banning their IP address from leaving any comments and removing any and all referral links they have previously posted. If abuse continues to happen the simple solution is that we will no longer allow anybody to share their links at all and the community will be worse because of it. I’d also like to remind readers to taking a few minutes when selecting a link to use and try to select a reader that you recognize, that makes useful comments on the site. You can view their posting history by clicking the ‘i’ button next to their name. If all readers did this then people trying to game the system simply wouldn’t get any referrals and they would be wasting their time. Sadly this is not the case.
I’d also like to thank the 99% of readers that do the right thing and follow the rules and the readers that help us call out others that are abusing the rules.
