Comments on: Phil Askey has a point

By: jmac2

jmac2 — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 04:53:06 +0000

so how did you solve your problem?

By: J-Mac

J-Mac — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 19:32:39 +0000

@none:

Courage? To let you post your drivel? What on earth are you afraid of “none”? (Nice self-descriptive name!).

I can see if people are using the referral link at a direct competitor’s website, like Flickr or Club Photo. That would be tacky. But using it at Dpreview doesn’t seem to such an offensive thing as some folks would have us believe.

By: none

none — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 18:45:06 +0000

You had it coming. You folks are plain intense marketeers. You recognized its spam, but did nothing about it till dpreview threatened to block you ,which would be a loss to your business. So please don’t turn around acting like saints.

The only reason you are reacting is because you fear lack of referrals.
i hope you have the courage to let my post through.

By: Boston USA Ringtone

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By: WS

WS — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 06:01:18 +0000

Why not do this? Create a new alias for your referral program. So e.g., create referral.smugmug.com/accountid=xxxxx
Explain to Phil that he can block all referral.smugmug.com. That will effectively kills all links that would be considered as advertising.
Having dpreview block smugmug is a BIG deal for many users, including me. I really hope you can solve this ASAP.

By: Seamus

Seamus — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 23:18:10 +0000

It just proves that Smugmug & Dgrin are far, far better and more democratic than DPreview.

One of the small points that I like about Dgrin is that discussions on the merits of other photo sharing sites are allowed to run their course without interference from the moderators and this blog often mentions competitors sites and praises them when it is appropriate. Mr. Askey should spend some time browsing through dgrin, he may get some hints on how to run a proper site.

DPreview doesn’t have moderators for it’s forums and trolling is rife. Ugly flame wars are rampant yet his only concern is that smugmug offers a discount voucher?

I have deleted his site from my bookmarks.

By: emandi

emandi — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 08:39:00 +0000

Joseph, in the original thread that was removed at dpreview I read SmugMug has tried for several years to advertise at dpreview and Phil replied that he don’t want any money from SmugMug.

It sounds like this is going to be solved soon though, but my respect for Phil is gone now. Not because of this but also because some other thinngs I have seen at dpreview earlier (imo immature censorship, lack of objectivity etc.).

It feels like dpreview has become to big and that Phil thinks he can do as he please. Perhaps he can now, but if other treated dpreview as Phil now treats other it would never has become so big.

By: Joseph S.

Joseph S. — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 04:45:57 +0000

One thing you didn’t mention: did you and Phil discuss becoming an advertiser on dpreview.com? It was hard to imagine that smugmug asked and was ignored previously.

By: Mark Draughn

Mark Draughn — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 04:12:24 +0000

There’s got to be some reasonable technical solution besides Phil’s over-reaction.

If Phil is amenable, you could probably put together a few perl scripts to spider his site and check every 13-digit word against your coupon database. Or feed all your coupon codes to Google site search. If you get a hit, you could contact the users involved and ask them to refrain, or just automatically change their coupon code, invalidating the old one.

In fact, maybe you could change the coupon code every time it’s used. This would make each coupon a token that is only good for one transaction. Coupons on forum postings would then become invalid after they are used, which would discourage people from using them, which would discourage the practice of posting them. You could throttle the rate at which users get new tokens. E.g. 5 at sign-up, then one per month thereafter. That should be enough for friends and family.

By: Jay Turberville

Jay Turberville — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 01:50:50 +0000

You may recall that I was involved in the Dpreview thread before it was yanked. I think the verbage you added about coupon code usage is weak. It is far too vague as it sits. It should contain some language that gives an example(s) of what is pushy usage. Perhaps something like this, “For example, please do not include your coupon code in signatures on other forums.”

If your intent is friends and family, then you really don’t want people including coupon codes in their online signatures.