you're pretty much describing the way it is now...
Most of us go to other forums to do a lot of business where this kind of thing isn't tolerated and then we come to GFY for the entertainment of the "tards"
I'm sure Eric would like to be able to keep us all here as well for BOTH business and "tards".
I mean let's face facts...all of us have given out a ton of industry secrets on this board to people who don't have the background or understanding of things to process it correctly. We've had huge embarassing arguments on this board that made our industry look really, really bad.
Think about it...furniture stores do a 200% markup straight out. But you don't see a "Go Furniture Yourself" forum announcing that to the general public.
Car dealerships make the majority of their money on backend and product. But their is no forum like this one that tells the car buyer that they are buying thousands of dollars of unneccessary stuff everytime they buy a car. God knows if their was...their would be jackasses who have never sold a car making snide comments about
: "Car dealership A makes all their money on the backend...NOT selling cars. They MUST be shady"
Now substitute "Car dealership A" with "Affiliate Program A" and substitute "backend" with "cross sale" and you see how we have basically opened up our business to people who have NO rights to know it.
Other industries wouldn't open up their business secrets to their very own customer base like we do right here on GFY.
I say move that talk to a protected section. Plus it would be even more fun to play the idiots out here that way. Oh the fake controversies and shitstorms we could orchestrate.
But the most important thing would be to close our business back up. It's the smart thing to do. And in these economic times, and with rampant piracy...we need to stop being stupid and start acting like businessmen.
Most folks on here are salesmen. Everybody that signs up for an affiliate program IS a salesman.
You won't find salesmen from any other business explaining what and how they do things to their customers. Believe me, both of my brothers are in the car business. They are smart and know how to "work" their customers and drain every last penny they can. And they damn sure aren't going to go on a message board and tell how it works. It just isn't the smartest thing to do.
We need a place to talk freely without the general public there. We don't need big threads about Company A fucking over surfers. We need to keep that in-house and solve it without that kind of stupidity. You know the public sees that "Company A" as representing every damn one of us.
So if people need to be alerted about it to pull traffic links...let's do it without our customer base being privy to confidential info.