I’ve noticed an increase in what I suspect to be scammers in the past few months. What do you think about increasing the requirements to post commercial stuff?
I was thinking something like that advertising is banned unless you can prove who you are by posting an OF link or a video where you say ‘hi, bfforums’ or something like that. Something simple to do but difficult for scammers to pull off.
And also a ban on covert advertising, where models don’t engage with the thread but just talk about themselves randomly in a bunch of places. Models are of course welcome to socialise with us outside of the commercial category, but ideally actual socialising without ulterior motives.
Any thoughts about this or about this topic in general?
Yep, I’m totally for this. I support our model community, but a lot of them treat us like they’re entitled to our money, or that we’re just endless cash machines, which I’m not a massive fan of. The scams are another huge problem.
Yeah I plan to look through the threads and delete any like that. Trying to quickly get someone off site to some unmoderated platform is pretty typical scammer behaviour.
I used to shove self-advertisement threads like that into commercial when I was a Regular, as discourse considers it. (I don’t visit and post enough for that level any longer, which is Just.)
I suspect that, if there were more friction to posting in commercial, they would leak into the other parts of the forum. I’ll grant, though, that keeping a tidy house for visiting merchants is probably healthier for our reputation among performers.
You would be allowed to advertise in the commercial category as usual, but you would need to post some kind of evidence that you are who you say you are. This should be good for video producers too since it means that nobody can steal your content and resell it pretending to be you.
Personally I think there should be a rule to post a sample if you start a thread in the commercial section. We could also require that the sample mentions the forums, or has a handwritten note or something like that in it.
It would also be nice to limit commercial posters from making too many threads. 99% of the time they should probably post in their own thread rather than making a new one.