I think I've recently picked up some negative vibes directed at the Marketplace forum and/or the recent threads there, so I thought it would be worth getting some feedback from the general membership to see if any adjustments are needed, or if we even should consider closing that forum going forward.
On VV that forum was called The Bazaar, but it had much the same function as on VF. The original idea was to offer a place for vegan businesses to advertise their products since contributing to the success of vegan businesses would be a way of advancing the cause of veganism in general.
It's not always easy to decide if a product or website is actually a vegan product/website, or whether they're just using the vegan label to make some quick bucks. That was certainly how it felt recently when we saw a huge influx of "vegan" themed t-shirt ads, most of which were claiming part of the profit would go to unspecified supposed vegan charities. (We ended up deleting most of those, I think.)
It's been suggested that perhaps we should require that a member makes a certain number of posts before they're able to post in that forum, so as to discourage "spam and go" threads, i.e. someone posting an ad and then we never see them again. That is certainly technically possible, and someone who is genuinely into veganism should be able to make a small number of posts on an Internet forum dedicated to veganism.
Some other things we could do:
On VV that forum was called The Bazaar, but it had much the same function as on VF. The original idea was to offer a place for vegan businesses to advertise their products since contributing to the success of vegan businesses would be a way of advancing the cause of veganism in general.
It's not always easy to decide if a product or website is actually a vegan product/website, or whether they're just using the vegan label to make some quick bucks. That was certainly how it felt recently when we saw a huge influx of "vegan" themed t-shirt ads, most of which were claiming part of the profit would go to unspecified supposed vegan charities. (We ended up deleting most of those, I think.)
It's been suggested that perhaps we should require that a member makes a certain number of posts before they're able to post in that forum, so as to discourage "spam and go" threads, i.e. someone posting an ad and then we never see them again. That is certainly technically possible, and someone who is genuinely into veganism should be able to make a small number of posts on an Internet forum dedicated to veganism.
Some other things we could do:
- make the Marketplace visible only to members who are logged in (to discourage people wanting to abuse VF for backlinks)
- make it possible to opt out of seeing threads/posts in the Marketplace
- make it so that all posts or all new threads in the Marketplace need to be approved by moderators before they become visible