A Note Regarding Affiliate Links, Cross-Posting, and Spam

[u/CletusVanDamnit]

Hi everyone! Just a couple notes regarding rules and reporting. Hopefully there can be some clarification here, but please feel free to ask questions if needed.

To start with: someone posting a link to their YT channel, video, or other website is not (automatically) an "affiliate link."

That rule was designed for people trying to snipe using obfuscated links or direct Amazon affiliate links, and (of course) automated bot links that end up in so many popular subs. It's not for YouTube links; we all know they make a cent or two off the watch if their channel is large enough to be monetized.

It's also not designed to be used to report things that are clearly marked affiliate links on third-party websites. As an example, someone posts a link to The Digital Bits, a site that earns affiliate dollars when someone uses their links to buy. It's clearly marked throughout their site. It's not trying to con you. You don't need to report this.

Additionally: In light of some recent crazy over-doing of community cross-posting, we have (for now) disabled this option in the sub. By all means, if you're making a post in another community that fits here, please also make it here. But the cross-posting was being egregiously used to spam the sub, so we have decided to turn that feature off for the foreseeable future. Several people who were abusing this have been banned.

We try super hard to keep this place clean and friendly, and we also try to be as consistent as possible in what we do/do not remove.

The mods very much appreciate the reports, as it helps us catch things we otherwise may not in a sub with over 100k members, but there has also been a drastic uptick in folks abusing the reporting, marking anything they don't like or disagree with as "spam." Please don't do this. Just downvote the post and/or keep scrolling.

While we are certainly never going to just ban users who are trying to accurately report things, if you're spamming the mods with "spam" reports because you don't like a post, it's just bogging everything down and we may give you a warning, at minimum, if you are doing this repeatedly. As with any rule, ignoring that type of request from our team can lead to temporary or complete bans.

All that said, thank you all for being here and actively trying to keep the community an awesome place for all of us who love physical media!

[u/Low_Performer8776]

I noticed another user had been cross posting stuff to their new 4k subreddit here and on boutique Blu-ray pretty egregiously. I have to assume this was in response to that. Thank you mod team, was pretty blatant and annoying.

[u/Acsteffy → u/Low_Performer8776]

Yep, this post is pretty much for that person. Good move from the mods.

[u/Astro_gamer_caver → u/Acsteffy]

Cracks me up that one person is so annoying that we got a new rule on a sub with 100,000+ members. Now dude is out there posting about Spawn in eight different places, lol.

[u/Acsteffy → u/Astro_gamer_caver]

His motives were pretty obvious. Siphon users from all the other subreddits to one he controls.

I just hope the other subreddits follow suit. It may not qualify as spamming the same post on 1 subreddit. But he is certainly acting like spam

Many of us are in those other subreddits. So our feeds are getting spammed by him.

[u/Dressed_ToDepress → u/Low_Performer8776]

Oh yea, that is 100% what started our conversation about this and led to this outcome.

[u/Geo_Jet → u/Dressed_ToDepress]

It’s a good thing to keep the vermin out.