Sandbox

Why are titled urls not allowed in our signatures? Does not make sense. If the site being linked is made out of joomla, i dont see why we cant title link it. Is it hurting the forum? no.

Im aware that this is free software. Great software. And a great community. But I also think at that letting users of the software and contributers to the community should be allowed to get a little PR boost by using titled urls in sigs. Why? Because one of the main reasons I see being used often for not using a CMS is how they rank poorly compared to standard html sites. If we help eachother rank better and show that joomla! ranks high in engines, people will come to joomla!.

Its good for everyone..

I think..

The real problem is people hiding affiliate links in their signatures. We found the only way to easily 'moderate' this is to make everyone use 'full' links.

I will however, have a discussion about this with Tonie (site admin) and see if it needed reviewing.

Thanks for your feedback.

brad, what happens if you surround [ url with affiliate id] seemingly full url [ / end of affiliate url] ..?
(don't wanna test)

Sorry Joe, you'll have to explain more
[me=brad]more confused[/me]

He just means creating a masked url that looks like a real url.

[ url = http: //affiliate link]http://some-pretend-real-looking-url.com[ /url ]

If your the owner of the site made with joomla, why would you need an affiliate url??

Im saying that titled urls should be allowed for sites that are joomla only..

I agree that affiliate linking will fill the boards with spam and cause people to register just to post useless posts to have their link in the sig. Simply nip them in the butt if they are found... or if a site is not joomla..

miikeremains wrote:If your the owner of the site made with joomla, why would you need an affiliate url??

Im saying that titled urls should be allowed for sites that are joomla only..

I agree that affiliate linking will fill the boards with spam and cause people to register just to post useless posts to have their link in the sig. Simply nip them in the butt if they are found... or if a site is not joomla..

With over 73,000 members, you can bet that many of them are here only for the purpose of posting links to their sites. In signatures, we do not require that the links point to joomla sites; we allow users to post to any site they want, as long as it does not point to a site containing adult or otherwise offensive content. Since we have so many thousands of users, it is undoubtedly easier to enforce a policy that links must be "unmasked" than to pick and choose which ones can and cannot be.

Another reason for "unmasking" links is to make it easier for users to tell where they are going for sure. I, for one, do not click on a link unless I can tell what the url is. By making it mandatory to use exact urls...it takes out the guesswork.

It's a small sacrifice. We allow people to include two links in their signature. They can point to their home page, their sales page, whatever...as long as it complies with the rules. We feel they should be happy with that and if they aren't, maybe they will get some satisfaction in knowing that we have already accepted the fact that we can not please everyone.

BTW....some sites do not allow the use of signatures at all.