adverts allowed in the forums now?

[GreenV8S]

I've reported a couple of posts from ecuflash recently that are advertising his business. The posts haven't been taken down and I see now that they have stickied and have a '£' icon. Does this mean that the adverts are authorised? If so it might be worth announcing the change in policy to avoid other false alarms. Perhaps also present the post in a way that makes it obvious that it's an authorised advert, because until now I thought there was no such thing.

[Plotloss]

GreenV8S said:

I've reported a couple of posts from ecuflash recently that are advertising his business. The posts haven't been taken down and I see now that they have stickied and have a '£' icon. Does this mean that the adverts are authorised? If so it might be worth announcing the change in policy to avoid other false alarms. Perhaps also present the post in a way that makes it obvious that it's an authorised advert, because until now I thought there was no such thing.

I believe its a sponsored post, or similar.

There was chat about it today.

Someone from HM will be along to clarify in a bit I'm sure.

[Big Al.]

Yep they are sponsored advertisers AFAIK, us mods only found out this afternoon.

We were inadvertently deleting them up until that point.

[Mr Will]

As the mods have said above, they are sponsored posts just the same as we have always offered, such as the 'Opie Oils' and 'A Plan Insurance' threads at the top of General Gassing (and plenty of other examples in other places too)

[crofty1984]

OK, but will there be a limit? (say, 2 per forum) I don't want to log into the P&P and find the first eight threads are stickied adverts.

[Mr Will]

crofty1984 said:

OK, but will there be a limit? (say, 2 per forum) I don't want to log into the P&P and find the first eight threads are stickied adverts.

Don't worry, we have never let people have sponsored threads if there are already a large number of stickies in a forum (sponsored or otherwise) and we don't plan on changing anything!

[GreenV8S]

Is the '£' icon the sign that these are authorised? I have never noticed that before - nor have I noticed any of the other sponsored posts. Perhaps it would be possible to change the way these posts are displayed to make it more obvious that they're authorised.

[Mr Will]

GreenV8S said:

Is the '£' icon the sign that these are authorised? I have never noticed that before - nor have I noticed any of the other sponsored posts. Perhaps it would be possible to change the way these posts are displayed to make it more obvious that they're authorised.

They have the £ icon, and are highlighted a different colour (green in PH classic, blue in Big Blue)

Is there anything else you can think of which would help them stand out?

[GreenV8S]

Mr Will said:

Is there anything else you can think of which would help them stand out?

You could explicitly state that it was an advertisement, in a format that wasn't easy to spoof using the existing formatting codes? That would make it obvious that it was authorised. If you're feeling ambitious you could combine that with contact details for the advertiser. You could make this as pretty or as simple as you want.

As it is, apart from the obscure '£' icon there's nothing to differentiate these adverts from Joe Public just taking liberties.

[Podie]

Big Al. said:

We were inadvertently deleting them up until that point.

[RacingPete]

GreenV8S said:

Mr Will said:

Is there anything else you can think of which would help them stand out?

You could explicitly state that it was an advertisement, in a format that wasn't easy to spoof using the existing formatting codes? That would make it obvious that it was authorised. If you're feeling ambitious you could combine that with contact details for the advertiser. You could make this as pretty or as simple as you want.

As it is, apart from the obscure '£' icon there's nothing to differentiate these adverts from Joe Public just taking liberties.

It is a fair point. We will look at adding something to the main text to differentiate them from normal posts for anyone who missed the £ sign next to the topic title.