familyman's C7

If the vendors have their own private section to sell their products, why do the continue to spam other sections with their for sale threads? I am specifically talking about the C6 general discussion and the C6 part for sale/wanted sections. But I'm sure the same goes for the other generations sections too.

savewave

familyman's C6: Since the site was launched in 1999, the premise has been that the supporting vendors would pay the costs of operating Corvetteforum so that the site would be free for the rest of us.

In exchange, they get exclusive marketing rights to sell their products and services to those who might be interested.

In recent years, we have limited the number of sales/marketing threads vendor was allowed in a section. The limit is no more than three threads on the first page of a 48-hour directory.

We later put a vendor sales sub-section in each of the generational sections, where vendors are not limited in any way on the number of sales/marketing threads they can post.

Long-term, the notion is that vendor traffic may shift more significantly toward those vendor sales sections, but at this point there is not sufficient exposure in those sections to justify removing vendors from the discussion areas they have used since 1999.

I checked the specifics on the sections you referenced and found a few mintues ago that about 29 percent of the threads in the C6 General Discussion area (first page, 48-hour directory) were vendor sales threads.

A few of those appeared to be on the first page of the directory because a customer had bumped them with a question or the vendor had responded to a question.

We don't count vendor responses to questions when we are checking to determine whether there are vendor sales threads in excess of the three allowed. We expect the vendors to be responsive to customer questions.

The vendor threads in the C6 Parts section was 2.6 percent.

We have at times seen the percentage well over 50 percent in small sub-sections with little traffic and if that becomes routine, we'll have to look at further adjustments to the sales thread count limit.

Meanwhile, if you spot what you believe are excessive sales threads by any individual vendor in a section, please report it to the section moderators and we'll be glad to take a look.

tungstenfoot

Just some comments to consider on this topic, because vendors off-posting has gotten worse not better, even in my short time here.
It makes no organizational sense to post a sale thread in a tech section. There may be precedents from 1999, but i bet this site is way more complex and populated than that now and frankly its just bad behavior. This forum has alot to offer vendors, lets be honest we talk nothing but corvettes here. But guess what, theres 2 more generations and more coming! That said, There are many, many other car forums that i frequent which do not have this problem at all. If we set migration deadlines and guidelines to vendors, they should comply, it should be part of their contract. Honestly, venders are partners with CF and they should be setting the example for everyone else. This is setting a bad precedent for others to do the same. Is it ok if i post repeated off topic threads? Ok, im being wise but hope you understand. We should all post in the appropriate section and post on topic!
I frequent the forum everyday, multiple times, cf should consider a "new posts" forum section with reference to which section the thread is from. This way, you know WHERE the thread or post is and if vendors post where they should, it still shows in the "new posts" section where people who frequent the forum will default before searching around. Again, many other forums run this format successfully.
Understand some metrics drive bad behavior, its not always about "clicks" and "views". Its about the user experience and when that degrades, users can get discouraged and wont frequent the forum as much.