awap:
How can we be sure this isn't just another commercial advertisement?
Maybe it is. If you review our policies we have absolutely no problem with people posting their url in response to a relevant question. So if I ask about getting my shorts in a knot and you own a site about this subject you are welcome to post the url as part of your answer. If you don't own a site about it but know of one you are also welcome to post the url as an answer. The idea here is very simple, someone has asked for information and you are providing it to them.
Our problem is not with people posting their urls, if it was we wouldn't allow them in signatures, we wouldn't have the FREE market place and we wouldn't let you post your relevant urls in a response. Our problem is with people starting threads all around the forum to advertise, promote or solicit traffic in any way shape or forum. There was a time when posting "visit my site" or "come here and submit photos" was grounds for an immediate ban because our advertising rules were so strict that no one and I mean no one could post a message that was promotional without consent. Those times are, thankfully, long since gone. We allow users a great deal of flexibility but this is still a forum and not a free for all. It's easy to look at an instance like John's and think to yourself, thats a great site, why can't he openly promote it. But it's never that simple, you can't say this site is good but hat site isn't good... we've tried doing the whole commercial vs non-commercial thing but sadly websites don't have to be registered with BBB so we don't know who really is commercial or who will be. Still, short of letting people openly start promotional messages we give everyone a great amount of latitude yet it seems that its never enough.
Another issue I have concern with is this whole idea that by having advertisers on the board we must be selling ourselves out or doing bad. Right now, 90% of our advertising is run through a 3rd party system aka Google. At times we do have private ad campaigns and those are certainly preferable but in either case the rules don't change. One of our biggest hurtles with some advertisers in the past (the way past) has been that they wanted more rights and permissions, when we told them no way, not happening they decided not to advertise here and that's fine with us. Our goal has never been to put the money before the user and we never have. Commercial businesses can purchase a banner, post in the market place, buy a sticky post in the market place, put a link in their signature and post a url when it relevantly answers a question but they can't do anything else and they certainly can not do what you can't do. Understand this, our moderators are volunteers from the community just like you are, they wouldn't stand for it, you wouldn't stand for it and we have chosen not to stand for it either -- ScubaBoard does not sell special favors to anyone.
With this said we are all for suggestions. If you can come up with a way to let people start a thread asking people to go to their sites and potential use their services that doesnt allow for anyone to come and spam the board in every forum then I am all for it. The best we could figure out was to stick them all in the marketplace but hey, were open to suggestions.