No More Pimping.

DeVore

Smart, NTL, IBB. I'm not well pleased with pimping on this forum. If you want to interact with your customers, feel free to talk to us about a Commecial Hosted forum. If you want to advertise, consider the banner ads.

This place exists because everyone that takes from it, gives something back too. Symbiotic vs Parasitic.

DeV.

Gilgamesh

this should go up as a sticky imo

dlofnep

I don't see any problem with someone taking the time out to answer some questions.. Why should they pay for the privilege to answer questions?

uberwolf

presumabely because they hope to make a profit from their time here.

RobertFoster

dlofnep wrote:

I don't see any problem with someone taking the time out to answer some questions.. Why should they pay for the privilege to answer questions?

Because they're using boards.ie to do it - and boards.ie isn't getting any revenue from it...

Töpher

It's also free marketing: "Oh look at us, we're nice and answer these nice peoples questions. If you have a problem we're here" etc. Not fair on boards.

davej

dlofnep wrote:

Why should they pay for the privilege to answer questions?

Because otherwise someone will have to make a judgement call each time as to whether or not the answer to the question is actually pimpage.

davej

DeVore

The celts used to farm apples millenia ago. The druids followed the practise too. Modern day Wiccans also follow suit. The common thing between them all was that they had a practise of taking a portion of their harvest and liberally sprinkling the ground of the orchard with perfectly good apples before taking their crops home. This was called "Natures Portion".

In effect, the apples rotted and fertilised the ground and the seeds planted themselves and provided new trees occasionally.

My point is that this is the orchard and while its ok to take from it, everyone needs to think about what future generations will have to eat. Before you reply to this thread, ask yourself "Have I ever given something back?". I'm not asking for answers, in fact I DONT WANT people to answer that, I'm just pointing out that all things need balance, give and take.

DeV.

po0k

That's very Zen of you Tom.

dub45

They are also getting lots of free market research and ideas which normally companies emplloy experts to gather at a great cost. (I hereby humbly exclude my own posts from either the market research or the ideas

CrowdedHouse

DeVores' message should be put at the bottom of the Smart employee thread and then the thread should be locked/recycled.

Ardent

I found the Smart Telecom thread very informative and I was glad the ST employee took time out to provide info on their proposed service. In his defence, maybe the term "pimping" should be in the charter.

Sponge Bob

True Ardent But He Was Warned.

See the Third post in this thread below

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=224613&page=1

OFDM

Ei2JC wrote:

DeVores' message should be put at the bottom of the Smart employee thread and then the thread should be locked/recycled.

That won't happen - if he did that they'd likely never consider buying a commercial interaction board - much better for business to warn them and hope they don't call his bluff - remember Dev's big into poker

Praetorian

Tom, from the way Gareth from Smart is answering questions it seems Smart really do care about interacting with people. A while back I recall Boards was going to resell dsl from Hosting365. If you still think boards becoming an ISP is a good idea then reselling the Smart Package would seem like a good idea. It's worth considering.

JB123

Praetorian wrote:

Tom, from the way Gareth from Smart is answering questions it seems Smart really do care about interacting with people. A while back I recall Boards was going to resell dsl from Hosting365. If you still think boards becoming an ISP is a good idea then reselling the Smart Package would seem like a good idea. It's worth considering.[/QUOTE
Sounds good 2 me i just hate giving money to eirscum.

mayordenis

Einst&#252 wrote: »

It's also free marketing: "Oh look at us, we're nice and answer these nice peoples questions. If you have a problem we're here" etc. Not fair on boards.

i fail to see the problem here,
and in fairness to smart there were dozens of people on here asking the same questions which nobody had the answer to.
someone from the company gave the answers no worse than a link to an FAQ on a site.

Xcellor

I was kinda pleased Smart took the time to answer questions. At least they are taking a partial interest in what customers want.

If Boards wants to make some money from this fine, but I didn't see him pushing his products above other companies only answering questions posed by individuals interested about broadband which is what the forum is for.

I think a company doing that is a lot better than people answering questions based on what they think they know or heard. I remember how many people have been confused when it came to download upload,, whether it was 16 gigs up/down or 8 up 8 down... and if just ONE IOL employee had of taken the time to explain that, there wouldn't have been so much confusion...

Well my 0.02 cents worth.

Iago

Xcellor wrote:

I remember how many people have been confused when it came to download upload,, whether it was 16 gigs up/down or 8 up 8 down... and if just ONE IOL employee had of taken the time to explain that, there wouldn't have been so much confusion...

Well my 0.02 cents worth.

more than one did...repeatedly...just nobody listened

Sleepy

I know I initially reported the SMART thread for that very reason. Why should Komplett pay for the priveledge and Smart not?

I mean, if you look at this board, there's a lot of subscribers here that are happy to donate and we're just regular members who feel we should contribute. Smart are a multi-million euro company, of course they should pay if they want to use Boards.ie as a means of communicating with their customer base.

TCP/IP

We complain when the telecoms companies dont give us any information and then when one company is forward thinking enough to interact with the people that will mostly use the service we knock them down. I for one thank smart for taking time to answer questions posted here. Maybe Dev if you came to an agreement were they suppiled hosting and broadband to you than a compremise could be reached.

Sully

What happened to Garfiled anyway?

lomb

smart would never have a paid forum simply for the reason they would have to answer silly questions. better to do it on a thread.
the diff with komplett is they have a forum for customer rmas and stuff.
most boards members would have zero objection to garfields presense on the broadband thread imho.

the_syco

Sleepy wrote:

I know I initially reported the SMART thread for that very reason. Why should Komplett pay for the priveledge and Smart not?

I mean, if you look at this board, there's a lot of subscribers here that are happy to donate and we're just regular members who feel we should contribute. Smart are a multi-million euro company, of course they should pay if they want to use Boards.ie as a means of communicating with their customer base.

I agree.

Also, its not so much as Smart should pay, its more why should Komplett.ie pay if Smart got it for free?

If Smart payed Dev a fee, they could answer the users questions, and also sell their products, without having to set up a board esp for it.

goldenbrown

would pigs have eaten some of the apples dropped on the ground of the orchard? and if so is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Peace

*planting cyber apple*



its fair dues, they want PR they pay for it.

MrAbc

Hi,
I would have thought it was fairly simple:

...if I posted a question here about broadband issues I'd expect impartial advice and discussion. Not the promotions of a possible multitude of sales reps
No matter what they could say to the contrary, it would take a long time for me to have any confidence in the impartiality of such people. Are they going to alert you to better alternatives?? If they want to promote their wares (even with 'helpful' advice), to benefit their business, I'd expect them to pay for the facilities to do that. If an area is set aside somewhere for them for free, then that's one thing. Plus, in any case, surely you've got to vet those who claim to speak on behalf of any company??

If each company wants to interact with its users, all they need do is set up a forum on their own website!! Why don't they all have one??
The obvious reason why they would come to a general public discussion board is to promote themselves = advertising. Simple. Some might welcome the products as interesting but what happens when lots of reps turn up on boards with products you're not interested in?

Spunog UIE

were some of the posts deleted/chopped?

jimi_t

This is only the tip of the iceberg. The sooner SMART, IOL et al. is moved to a paid, commercial forum, the better. If not, we will soon have an influx of Sales Reps from every two-bit electronics outfit - ultimately destroying the character of the online community DeVore has nurtured from birth.

secret_squirrel

To be fair I dont think all the thread was pimpage. I personally think that one free time limited pimpage thread to allow a commercial entity to gauge the interest in a commercial forum would be a good compromise both for Boards.ie, its members and the company doing the pimpage.

Taking the example of the smart thread - its generated more than enough interest to justify taking a commercial forum at this stage imo.

Also is there money to be made in getting boards.ie to host 'official' forums of a company?

halenger

They could easily use it as their support forum and a lot of silly questions would be answered before support people get to it, ya know?

Spacedog

Smart Telecom, Your populatity has the momenteum of a runaway train, why are you so popular?

This be the thin end of the spam wedge on boards.ie, nail it down now I say.

Frankly I don't know how boards stays up as long as it has considering the bandwidth it must use and the work put into it. Why an online community should waste resources to benifet a heartless multinational company is beyond me.

From a business perspective, boards is privately run is it not? (doesn't recieve government funding or anything?), if people want to use it as an advertising agency, don't boards have the right to limit the manner in which it is done and to be compensated for doing it.