Is there any guidelines available on clickbait links?

[wozzek23]

In some sense clickbait links are no different from referral links. Forum rules are not allowing promoting referral codes/links but I guess there is no rule on clickbait links.

I believe starting a new topic with external links would be good but to understand that topic, OPs should not enforce to click their links. They must include necessary parts of external source as "quote" or "code". Links should remain optional for the people to wants to learn more on that subject.

Already theymos alerted us by providing green highlighting for internal links, I guess adding rules on driving traffic to clickbait links saves this community in same sense.

[AdolfinWolf]

Use common sense and report posts that solely post so they can spam a(n) (off-topic) link? I'm pretty sure they'll get deleted by moderators the same way excessive posting of refferal links will get your posts deleted.

Forum rules are not allowing promoting referral codes/links

They do allow referral links as long as they're not the primary reason for you creating the post/thread AFAIAA.

[wozzek23]

Use common sense and report posts that solely post so they can spam a(n) (off-topic) link?

In my understanding, we can report only the things which are breaching the rules. This is the reason, I suggest for guidelines for external links.

They do allow referral links as long as they're not the primary reason for you creating the post/thread AFAIAA.

I have come across posts/open-posts where people provided both ref.link and non-ref.link and some people were mentioning about sending ref. codes in PM for the people who shows interest. Both have been allowed as per I have observed even those contents were created to promote their links. Letting ref. links "optional" is not a problem as per rules, I guess.

[hugeblack]

The rule did not clearly indicate referral links, but rather all types of posts of low quality or spam.
Any low-quality post or primary purpose for which the link is post is to ads those links will be included in that rule.

Remember, these are not offical rules.

[LoyceV]

I too am in favour of new rules to end this. I'd say the rule could be something like: "link dumps are not allowed".

Lately, I see more and more users who only post links to external websites. That's advertising, and thus not allowed, but somehow they don't just all get banned. There's not even any discussion value, as they abandon the topic instantly, after which the sig spammers take over.

[jackg]

I too am in favour of new rules to end this. I'd say the rule could be something like: "link dumps are not allowed".

Lately, I see more and more users who only post links to external websites. That's advertising, and thus not allowed, but somehow they don't just all get banned. There's not even any discussion value, as they abandon the topic instantly, after which the sig spammers take over.

It's for marketing purposes, because when they get posted on public forums the search engine crawlers go and visit them and use that in their page rankings (from an anonymous source)...



Yeah a new rule wouldn't be bad but it'd be hard to work out what is link spam and what clearly isn't.

Maybe "any unfamiliar (not from major site) links posted should have relevant quotes from the page copied on that post". And those quotes can be used to decide if the thread would class as spam or not.

[mk4]

I think literally dumping links shouldn't be allowed regardless of topic. For example, something like this:

how to get hired for bitcoin: www.insertURLhere.com

Compared to something that I've posted in the past which I think should be legal:

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARKcHZ45y_k

Has anyone watched this documentary? Like a month ago I was bored and was just looking around low budget bitcoin documentaries on YouTube, and stumbled on this one. While the title is so clickbaity and I didn't like the short scenes of Robert Kiyosaki, I find the documentary to actually be good(or is it just that my expectations were low). Especially for a documentary that's just made by a random YouTuber.

Any opinions?

^Whereas the topic actually at the very least has a short description to actually spark a conversation. And yes, I know it's a YouTube link and not a link to a random site; but I mentioned this just as an example.

[skarais]

~~~

At first I only believed that the topics created and had links to other sites were to strengthen the argument or make the discussion better. But finally I realized that some people can even use this to send links intended for advertising and personal income.

I often find threads created by newbie to send this type of link and so on, the OP disappears without moderation on that thread. The right course of action in my opinion is to report to the moderator for removal or with appropriate consequences or is there another way to ban such types of posts or threads?