I want to preface this post with a few ‘guidelines’ itself. No nasty name calling, no saying we’re ‘stupid’ or that you think our site sux…this is simply to address some rampant and untrue rumors and innuendo making the rounds about our beloved ADG.
First, the ADG is NOT in place to ‘restrict’ our members from discussing agencies – sadly, many of the rules on this site are borne from past experiences – experiences that we had before many of you became active and participating members here. The ADG was ‘adopted’ in February 2004 because a number of overzealous and unethical agencies thought that forum posting was a great way to tarnish the image of their competitors as well as sing their own praises. We had a number of agencies who posted almost daily about how they were unhappy clients of XYZ Agency…going on and on about the really negative experience they had…then, turn around and talk about a wonderful agency that was so great and fabulous. While this hasn’t *stopped* with the ADG – we truly believe that the agencies who were guilty of doing these things have moved on where they can address a bigger audience. The ‘work’ involved in PM’ing members to do the above is far less lucrative than reaching 30K members a day on the open forum.
No, the ADG was not adopted because of our advertisers. The plain and simple truth is this: Forums make us no money. Our advertisers HATE a forums ad rotation because there is just no ‘action’ here – like there are on many of our other pages. Seriously, games.adoption.com (our lame-o game site) is more sought after than a forums ad rotation – and it has nothing to do with agency discussions – forum users, historically, just aren’t ad clickers. (Even if you guys were ad clickers – graphical banners that are in your face are far more effective than a forum post).
The ADG was not adopted to censor our members – it was adopted to level the playing fields and offer our members the ability to obtain true and factual information about agencies without having to worry about the validity of the information.
There are rumors going around out there that we’re doing it to provide our advertisers with an upper hand. There are rumors out there that we actually run an agency and only allow people to talk about our agency. Neither of these things is true.
The fact of the matter is the ADG is in place to protect our members from unethical practitioners…to make sure our members are getting true and accurate information from our actual members – not some troll who works for an agency and trolls message boards all day to drum up business.
It happens – I see it all the time on other forums – sadly, being the biggest – we attract the most – so the ADG was adopted to address that.
I’d be happy to answer your respectful questions, if you have them
