Skimlinks trial on MSE forums

jenniewb

Maybe you could have it as an option where you could "opt out" of either viewing or having the skim-links on what you read or what you post. Just like there are "sites which do/don't help this site" posted at the bottom of various pages, it could be something that could be there by default but you could opt out of.

At least give people the option though, I understand people can vote with their feet but it just would have been nice to have been asked.

robt_2

Web hosting and bandwidth costs have not suddently jumped up - so will there be a tangible benefit to the average user, or have you been running at a loss for the last few months? Will the revenue go towards better forum support? A full time person dealing with abuse emails?

Obviously this is only a trial so there is no need to answer - but if the trial is successful then these are questions which could be addressed.

If you won't/can't say, doesn't it go against your transparency? You are having affiliate links - what is next - launching a cash back site?

I also note you ignored my question about Skimlinks cookie and privacy policies - does that mean there something to hide?

KingL

Are we sure about the cookies? I purged mine last night and did a 'trial' after the outage this morning when I made a post including a link to a M&S online shop item and then followed it. My browser is set up to ask my permission for new cookies and I didn't get any prompts when I folllowed my M&S link.

Since purging all my cookies I have accepted the main MSE cookie (that allows you to remain logged into the MSE forums), but apart from that, I don't seem to have had any new cookie requests.

Mind you, i have never understood exactly how beacons work....

JimmyTheWig

jenniewb wrote: »

Maybe you could have it as an option where you could "opt out" of either viewing or having the skim-links on what you read or what you post. Just like there are "sites which do/don't help this site" posted at the bottom of various pages, it could be something that could be there by default but you could opt out of.

I'm not sure that the opting out would work particularly well, but I do like the idea of the "links that help this site" analogy.
Maybe at the bottom of the page there could be a section which tells the user which links have been skimlinked and give un-skimlinked versions.
This would be great for transparancy, whilst barely affecting the profitability of the exercise.

oakhouse13

Easy opt out of an advertising network like Skimlinks is something the Information Commissioner has said he expects as best practice. It seems fair. If you want to surf the web and not have external files loaded onto your computer when using a link that is not labelled in any way, there should be a one click way to do that imo.

Former_MSE_Dan

Hi folks,

Just a reminder that - as some posters above have mentioned - this is still a trial at the moment, and we are reading helpful suggestions and will discuss whether and how to put any of them into practice.

jackbauersurfingtheweb wrote: »

However, by adopting skimlinks onto the MSE forums i believe this is actually taking advantage of the thousands of people that post their opinions on a daily basis on this forum. I struggle to understand why MSE should profit from user generated content and im keen to know what on earth MSE will be doing with the extra revenue (which is undoubtedly going to be a heck of a lot!) to improve things for their users and basically justify becoming a salesman for high end merchants.

In my opinion forums like this should be used for anyone to discuss issues, points and opinions without their thoughts on certain companies actually being turned into a sales channel for that particular company!

As noted, this is a trial, and it may enable the forum to generate income for itself for the first time, and as we've said, we want it to work in a way that is comfortable for users and doesn't cause any issues - but the object of the trialling is to see just that.

As stated in the first post, we hope the extra income would enable us to justify spending more on support and resources for the forum - which we think it would be useful.

If there's more it may also enable us to give more to charity and it may add to the site's overall revenue and profitability - and there's nothign wrong with that either - again providing it doesn't impact the user negatively or impact the editorial - which we have safeguards to prevent.

On your point of turning MSE into a sales channel, the use of Skimlinks will make absolutely no difference to how the forum content is generated. All users can post whatever they like, with no intereference from MSE, except crucially links for their own company and that will continue - no one is likely to transact any more or any less on the back of this.

The only possible issue we've detected above is one for cashback users and that's something we will monitor.


If there are problems caused we'll either pull this or fix it - but we can't know without trialling it.

PS. If anyone is wondering why Martin isn’t replying, it's because I'm managing this project and we wanted one person on top of it all doing it

meher

never heard about skimlinks before but seen this is in another form on nytimes and I used to think that's neat, very clever I suspect it's the trend now

on ny times it links us automatically to the dictionaries even; if you happen to read that clinton's daughter wore Oscar de la Renta gown, it takes you to the Oscar de la Renta gown shop to look for information, price and other options - very helpful to settle all curiosities it's so resourceful and a fantastic feature as well

I don't know if it is meant to happen here on mse but on other sites, the moment you just type amazon, even without the website address, it automatically turns into a link. I think.

Am I right in guessing that non pure money boards mean the home boards, shopping, OS and MSA? That phrase is something that I haven't got round understanding the classification. btw thanks for letting us know and wish it's a success for mse

Former_MSE_Dan

Hi meher,

The process you describe is absolutely not what will happen on MSE. No links will be added where users have not already posted them themselves.

The Pure Money boards are the top 14 if you go to the index page here- http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/. Everything apart from those (and the referrers board) have Skimlinks applied to them for the trial

oakhouse13

Dan, why is Skimlinks not on the money boards? Is it issues with what affiliate networks called closed programs?

This is meant to be helpful, what happens to skimmed links that are posted to Twitter, like this one for example?

http://twitter.com/crazy_lurve/statuses/20381873134

Skimlinks apparently has a url shortner that disguises affiliate links on Twitter.

It's not editorial that is the issue imo, it's that you will have to moderate every post in the way you already moderate very well any content where you post affiliate links, for obvious reasons.

Former_MSE_Dan

Hi oakhouse,

For the trial period, we have decided to keep Skimlinks only for non-financial products, as we have various checks to do regarding that, and wanted to do the trial to see if it was worth pursuing.

I don't understand your second point - that twitter bitly ink just goes to a thread on MSE with no external links on? Anyway, on MSE Skimlinks won't be shortening any links, just skimming ones that already exist. And we won't be posting skimmed links to Twitter.