Paid Signatures
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If you'll notice at the end of my post is my signature. Within it is a link to my website. I've gotten a few people in trouble by telling them to add a link to their signatures to promote their plugin or business. Now I don't pay anything to SketchUcation for that privileged, but from what I've been told it's against the current rules of sketchucation to do so without an agreement with the administration. You see I've been here for a really long time... Actually before it was SketchUcation. the 5000 posts you see under my name are just the number of posts since the last big crash when most of the board was lost, and I've had this link the entire time, so from what I've been told I'm kinda grandfather'ed in to having it. Until they read this post...
Around the internet it's a bit of a debate about signatures and the do's and don't of them. If you allow people to make signatures as they please you'll soon end yup with lots of spammers making memberships just to get a link to their site. You'll also get hackers putting juicy, misleading links to entrap would be victims, not to mention the disreputable pirates who will offer ill-gotten wares in their signatures.
You might ask why would I want the link? I want it for the 'Link Credit" of a well recognized website linking to my own. I do get a fair amount of traffic from the link, I would say about 10-20 unique visitors per day. Now mind you that these visitors are not of any real use to me, I don't do any inter-industry work, I sell house plans, and these people are looking for information on sketchup. So I never make any sales from this traffic. But, that's not to say that you wouldn't... Perhaps you do renderings or interior design or even product prototyping, etcetera... Then a signature could be very valuable to your business.
I'm not sure of the current rules about this and wonder if someone might come along and clarify it. But I wonder if it could be offered as a product to be purchased for promotional use. Like perhaps with the premium membership?
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Thanks for raising this topic Kris.
The current thinking on 'signatures' is that they are only as useful to the member as the member contributes to the forums. In other words, the more the member gets involved the more exposure his / her signature gets.
Of course we have had in the past some members just coming along with lots of 'parking' comments, 'Great Work', 'Nice' etc but we normally have a word with these folks.
I think it might be good to bounce the topic around and see what happens. We had thought in the past about organising some kind of a 'Freelance Services' section whereby members could take up an advert slot on a Classified Adverts Section.
If there is enough interest in this we could look into it again.
Mike
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It might be a useful added extra income for the site, not for me personally but those profesionals who do use the site might benefit as well as the site finances.
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