I remember you from EG and if you recall, I was regularly posting and minding my own business when they decided to start giving me time outs and deleting posts because of other posters accusing me of stuff I never said, mostly about looking down on the poor and how people promoting their youtubes shouldn’t be encouraged on EG.
But then the real trouble started when I complained about my time outs. I’m not a child. I’m a middle-aged woman who was contributing good content that took me hours to create and I was proud of. I refuse to be part of a forum that takes my work so flippantly. I was willing to put up with the weird DMs and overall nastiness of some members, as long as they didn’t mess with my posts, but once they start putting me in timeouts and deleting my posts at their discretion, that’s when I left. I don’t see how they think they can survive as I was the only new member that year and the majority of the twitter and FB posts were rehashes of my posts! But that’s the funny thing, I don’t think they care.
That was my EXACT complaint about Chowhound when I first left, I was NOT shitposting like I do now. I was submitting good content that I took seriously and they would randomly remove my posts, like they were trying to piss me off to leave the forum.
I’ve seen this exact behavior with another member just recently, so you can’t tell me it isn’t true.
Well anyways, that’s why I think forums are becoming dinosaurs, people don’t want to submit their content to sites that aren’t going to respect it and the poster. Internet nastiness is inevitable, just look at youtube comments section, but that’s the price to pay if you want your content online. The line for me is when mods get involved and start editing per their “discretion”. Well, they can edit all they want, it won’t be my content, they can write their own. Or see their forum die, usually it’s the latter.
Similar to @shrinkrap I wasn’t trying to make any generalizations about people in the digital marketing field, my daughter works in it but does not participate on these boards. I only have Facebook so I do not know what IG really does, nor do I know that my daughter is on it though I assume she is.
Becoming an “influencer” is a recent phenom it seems with the millenials, their is good money to be made in a new form of digital marketing where you become the delivery vehicle for introducing new products to your "followers’ and you get paid by the products you introduce.
I see you commenting a lot about some bad experiences on other boards in the past. I hope you haven’t had similar problems here, I would hate for bad experiences elsewhere carry over here and lessen the experience. I think we have a good community of people here, don’t let past experiences skew your enjoyment here!
Well, I’m glad to hear that you’re not here as a digital marketer! I know you’re linked to the business, so I thought you might be, but it’s reassuring to know that you’re here giving out real advice and recommendations, not trying to sell stuff.
TBH, I’m rarely here, I did have a rather unpleasant interaction with someone on the LV board, so I stopped posting there. Besides, it didn’t look like my reviews were getting any traction.
There seems to be a lot less moderation here, so you can post more controversial posts and they are not removed. I’m sorry if it comes off like I’m here to complain, that is not my purpose. I’ll try to contribute more “food” posts, but honestly I don’t have the time to write stellar reviews and take pictures, reply to comments, etc…
No I can assure you I am not a digital marketer or an influencer so you are safe with me! lol I am a moderator here, though not for this board so I’m glad to hear you find he moderation here less intrusive than elsewhere. We tend to try to the the discussions flow in whatever direction they find themselves and try to only intervene when one of the few rules, such as personal attacks etc. take place.
Sorry your posts on Vegas didn’t get much traction, personally I enjoy posting my experiences regardless of how much of an audience I have, though I do come from one of the more popular boards on here so I admit I"m spoiled to a certain extent. (NJ)
We use Zotabox to encourage people to sign up, and display the social icons on the right hand side of the screen.
No ads on the site. We do use Google Analytics to keep stats. We pay for the $50 monthly cost to run the site with Amazon link referrals, and we roughly break even.
We don’t have digital marketers or influencers here. That ethical purity thing is why we aren’t rich, lol.
If we ever have the time to figure out how, we’d want a simpler, non-cloud-hosted social buttons (i.e. don’t have to rely on others), and host our own statistics software so we don’t have to rely on Google Analytics. though its a bit too much work for a small site.
Thanks for the insight. I don’t see the social network buttons - they are blocked by my ad blocker. Interestingly my ad blocker (ABP) doesn’t object to Google Analytics.
Depending on just how much data you collect from the social network icons I’d volunteer to help out. Server-side is easier for me (Perl or PHP) but client-side Javascript is possible, I’m just rusty. I hand code so no tool dependencies.
Would you share your Amazon referral number with me? I’m going to buy a bunch of stuff (not food related) for a customer and Hungry Onion might as well get credit for the pennies.
Its not really data we collect from the icons but rather encourage people to share pages from the site to social network- ‘to get the word out’.
The forum software itself only allows CSS and HTML. which was why we used these cloud buttons in the first place because we just needed to call their javascript. we can host our own javascript, but that’s another set of problems to tackle.
I believe there are ways to implement a set of social share buttons with just CSS/ HTML. and that’ll work perfectly fine also. Even Zotabox slows down the page loading by about a quarter to half a second.
I can hand code CSS and HTML for the links. That’s really easy. There would be two images to host. I have a lot of other things on my plate (ha!) so it will take a few days. I’ll do that and send you the code to look at. If you like I can drop it into your framework after you look at the code. Do you have staging before production? Then you could test before roll-out. I’m happy to help. I like it here. Paying forward.
I can’t speak for HO or for @sck so this is just for background. Amazon has a program where people who post links can get an Associates account that includes a reference number. If someone clicks the link and buys something the Associate gets a very small commission at no additional cost to the buyer. That was the reference number I was asking for so I could modify the links I use to buy for my customer so HO gets those few pennies.
Now about food: yesterday I made red beans with Andouille sausage for red beans and rice at dinner tomorrow. I cooked a bunch of chicken destined for chicken burritos and chicken salad later today. Dinner tonight is BLTs to use up bread before it gets stale. We may not make it through the loaf so there is panko in my future.
