riku2

I think there are some words which you cannot use in your comments on their site, if you do your comment just will not appear - mainly mention of things that might impact the revenue from referrals from the HfP site. I noticed somebody added a comment today about a BA offer that was not mentioned on the HfP site and even mentioned they expected their post to be deleted (and had to put hyphens in a word to stop it being blocked a-u-t-o-m-a-t-i-c-a-l-l-y). Looking a few hours later the comment is gone. The post did not criticize HfP or mention any other poster or person, but the post is gone now.

Raffles

If people want to have "you killed Jesus!" discussions then that's fine by me, but not in my house.

We have taken a more aggressive line since my historic quote on this topic - as has Ben @ OMAAT, the other historic hold-out against censorship - because the general quality of discourse has dropped, unfortunately.

84fiero

I didn't see anything remotely political about the article itself. It was just a trip report.

Censoring comments that point out better offers than the site's affiliate link is more of a concern than blotting out politics, off topic, etc.

eponymous_coward

https://www.godsavethepoints.com/apo...-upgrade-pack/

“Last year, Upgrade Pack, a start up by a team I was proud to be familiar, with hit me up about highlighting their innovative new platform.

As I noted in the coverage, which I was compensated for...”

I pointed out that his coverage didn’t make it at all clear he was compensated.

https://www.godsavethepoints.com/mee...l-upgrade-app/

“When I heard about Upgrade Pack, I approached it with a fair degree of skepticism. Surely it couldn’t be that easy. But after speaking to Founder & CEO Craig Unsworth, it appears that it actually is. Upgrade Pack allows you to add your reservation with a selection of airlines and hotels and receive an instant upgrade price quote. Not only that, there’s a discount involved too – in the region of 20-30% of the upgrade price.”

OH HAI POST BALEETED.

So yeah, dude deletes posts and takes advertorial payola without disclosure. Nothing personal, we all make a living somehow, but there you are.

GUWonder

Some of the miles and points blogs seem to be heavily influenced by whomever they are courting or trying to maintain good relations to get/maintain feed of some sort or another for some travel service provider or another; and then they go on the attack or defense based on that kind of personal affiliation/affinity. And there is other circular backscratching and brown-nosing that is part of the scene.

Expecting the miles and points bloggers to be more impartial, objective and consistent than the average person is to expect too much. And given how people tend to be sensitive to criticism of various sorts and tend to react to criticism, can’t say I’m surprised that some of the bloggers disappear some comments (or more) even when the contributions aren’t spam.

eponymous_coward

Well, it seems to me that this is a bit different if you are actively being paid for content with no disclaimer surrounding the content, only revealing that once you found out the people who were paying you were running a scam.

The average person also isn't writing blog content for US audiences that can run afoul of FTC regulations. Direct payola for content is very much something you need to disclose at the time you're writing it.

Am I surprised the comment was deleted? Not really. It wasn't particularly adversarial, just pointing that out.