legster - 5:22 pm on Mar 21, 2002 (gmt 0)

Great thread!

Some of you might remember when I posted about a year ago about this. I almost lost my job because I flatout refused to spam messageboards to promote our company site. I never did it, and I stuck to my guns. In the end I was able to talk the company out of it.

I would hate to see business reccomendations go away though completely. I recently changed my host company to a company recommended here on this board, and I'm very happy. As a general rule, I tend to pretty much ignore any kind of recommendations from someone with only a few posts. Most of us know the veterans of the board, and who to trust and who not to.

I recently had an interesting experience on my board. We had actually done some write-ups about a product, and sent them some traffic. They posted on our messageboard about their product, and I didn't mind since it was a related product to our site, and we were promoting it anyway. A month later they came back, and with the same exact nick represented themselves as a customer and made a bunch of false statements about the product and how everyone should go buy it. Instead of deleting it like normal I posted my disappointment in response, and then locked the thread down. I removed posting privileges from that nick so that they could not edit it. Now everyone who reads that thread sees that company in a different light. :)