I am not invested in any business that markets towards FlyerTalkers and commercialization comes in two avenues to me with the first being that F/t is part of a business and the second being that members who post links to commercial ventures.
Flyertalk is a business and a business needs to make money. Internet businesses like F/t make money via advertising and with that, I have no issue with advertising on F/t provided that the advertising...
- is in good taste
- is relevant to F/t (I wouldn't want to see ad's for "Joe's Auto Body"
)
- Is functional so that it doesn't interfere with viewing content, causes pages to draw slowly and/or browsers to crash
As to commercial posts in signatures I am against this for two reasons.
- It's free advertising for the commercial venture. If the commercial venture wants to be referenced, take out an ad.
- There is also no way to know if the poster who references the commercial venture in their signature has a vested interest in said commercial venture and if yes, again, it's free advertising.
Now with that, I may or may not have violated what I just said as depending upon how one looks at it as prior to changing my signature to say that I am running for Talkboard, I had a link in my signature to the home page of a blues band which I have been following for 35 years. I have no vested interest in the band other than I am a huge fan but and again, depending upon how you look at it, it could be taken as free advertising as opposed to me simply hoping that there might be one other fan out their in the F/t family so with that, I think that any external link in a signature needs to be looked at and evaluated and if found to be a commercial venture, the member needs to be contacted for an explanation as to what their relationship is with the entity-and especially if the link leads to another internet board which is related to travel.
For the issue of commercial posts, I'd like to pose a question back to the member who asked the question as to what they mean by "commercial posts in the forum" as I see this as commercial posts being nothing more than ads set up as posts and appearing in the middle of a thread which will detract from the subject at hand (and imho, pi$$ people off)