As I male, I don't imagine I can speak intelligently to 3, though I'm not sure why commercial activity would disproportionately intimidate females more than males.

As to 1 and 2, I've heard this argument before and I feel it's quite unfair. The UMD has been a central part of the community for more than 2 decades, and yes, many aspects of it are commercialized, and rightly so, as I daresay it costs plenty to run/admin the site. The fact that other forums where the ratio of "discussion" to commercial activity was different have shut down does not put any obligation on the UMD to make this forum more like those forums. Specifically for 2, UMD offers plenty of options other than the forum to connect and discuss, from Groups to Personals to Chat, so a lower ratio of theoretical discussion posts on the main Messy forum is hardly "suppressing" such discourse or "fatally undermining" anything. The internet is a big place, anyone is free to start a forum (or a Group on UMD) to cater to any potential minority "discussion" they like.

That said, I agree that there are reasonable compromises, a "sales" group seems legit, though it puts the onus on the producer to make a post (could that be an automated option? A post gets auto-created with the details once a sale is established?).

The "following" of stores is trickier, since the very reason one might run a sale is to encourage people who hadn't previously bought something or might not be aware of the store. The "following" option is good, but I don't think it's a fair substitute for a general post. An alternative would be to have a "block" button - if you think Producer X is posting about scenes and sales too often, you can block them so you won't see their posts. A "commercial" tag could also allow filtering for people who don't wish to make purchases.


EXACTLY. I think the notion of producers "flooding" the forum with posts about their sales every month is a bit "Chicken Little", given that it would be a...questionable business decision to run a sale every month.

For a producer with a large back catalog, posting a de minimis sale (say 10% off) on a discrete number of old scenes each month (if not more frequently) would likely make sense for a lot of producers and would be used as a sound sales strategy, as the benefits of page positioning (creating traffic to the store and hopefully generating additional full price sales in addition to the discounted scene and/or creating a new repeat future customer) would outweigh the small loss in margin for the on-sale dormant scenes that weren't going to be generating sales that month anyways

Indeed, there used to be quite common $5 scene of the week posts on here, with a new post every week (not month). This isn't per se a criticism of that practice (especially under the rules of the site at that time), but just to point out that there have been in the past producers that have run sales every week and have promoted them through new threads

In the case that started this thread, so far the producer concerned has posted about WOTD sales five times this year, and that's not including the deleted one. Once in January, twice in February, once each in March and April. So producers posting about sales every month is definitely already a thing, hence why the "only 2 sale promos per year in the forums" rule is there.

TBH the "Terms & Privacy" are well worth a read, well written (plain English, no waffling legalease) and MM constantly updates them. The link is in the blue footer at the bottom of every UMD page. https://umd.net/termsofservice

This is ridiculous. Why are people whining about "spammy" sales post? Is this not also WAM content?

This is why I voted for no limit. Free market capitalism let producers do what they want. It's their business not yours.

And if you don't like it maybe don't click on it? Are people getting triggered over WAM content now?

I don't think you realise how many producers there are and how many sales posts could be sent out.

Spammy = flooding, Without limits the whole board would eventually be sales advertising as when their sales post drops off the first page, the producer would jut put up another. Ultimately no one would come to the forums as it would just be adverts and would hurt sales and new content, amateur stuff etc.

As for the "Free-market" BS, this is nothing stopping them doing content and selling it, but this is MM's site so he can do with it what he wants, and this is advertising and also part of the free market.

As for the "triggered" comment, I am sure you think you are being funny but making light of people with PTSD is not funny (where 'triggered' comes from), and this is a 'discussion' and quite constructive. It's what adults do.

Why would the commercial activity disproportionately intimidate more women than men? Well simply put the volume of content is by no means proportional. Go to the Messy forum, sort it by when a thread was Born and then use the female filter and currently you can just about see the last few posts from 7 days ago at the bottom of the first page. Now switch the filter to male and you can see posts as old as 19 days ago on the first page.

Now I'm not going to suggest for one moment this bothers all women as that would be nonsense as no group of people is homogenous and indeed the differences between averages in two different groups of people is pretty much always less than the variance within each group. However to suggest no women would be bothered by this would be as ludicrous as if one were to suggest all are bothered by it.

And if some are bothered by it and we wish for the WAM community to remain inclusive (which I assume is the case given the frequency of threads regarding women's experiences on the UMD) we need to consider all perspectives when looking to find an appropriate balance of what might be conflicting interests rather than shrug our shoulders and say screw it, it is already 80% porn may as well be more.

Whatever content takes up the majority of the main forum will inevitably set the tone for how people interact with the rest of the site. Nobody goes to OnlyFans for scintillating conversation or xHamster for insightful vlogs.

Similarly I'm not going to suggest there aren't men also affected by the nature of the content split either. When I first started out in WAM my favourite place to post was in the Splosh forums, it was like a second home to me, whereas I was a little more apprehensive posting on the UMD. At the time I didn't know why I felt this way. Both forums were run by admin and moderating teams I thought did a great job (certainly didn't think any fault lay there), both sites permitted quite a few commercial posts and this feeling predated my work with Crossdressmess which attracted a little harassment from a couple UMD lurkers despite the content being clearly marked male/CD content in the thread title (this was back before the trans tab existed but anyway this didn't really affect me as they were lone arseholes and I had dealt with worse stuff on other sites for other projects).

It wasn't until much later I was able to understand why I had those two very different feelings about what on the surface seemed like two very similar forums. Essentially it is a rare person who has managed to grow up with a kink or fetish who hasn't accumulated some degree of shame or guilt about it. Whilst I can only talk about it from the perspective of growing up in the UK but as a general rule society just about tolerates porn and unconventional sexual practices but it doesn't approve of them/find them acceptable. At best your kink may be consider harmless enough to just be ridiculed and at worst it might subject to parliamentary discussions as to whether to ban it in porn outright. Now obviously I can't speak for the US but I would imagine given the degree religion affects your politics that many of you have the additional dimension of religious shaming to toss into the social programming you've waded through whilst growing up. As such when most of us finally found our first WAM community site we're all bringing some degree of baggage with us we picked up from society.

The difference for me between the Splosh and UMD forums when I first came to scene was that the Splosh forums with more community discussion posts that were certainly influenced by the shamelessness of the magazines made it much easier to work through and shed that baggage foisted on you be society. On the flip side the UMD's forum having a greater emphasis on promoting produced WAM content meant there was less opportunity of people to work through these issues. As a result I felt that there was a higher degree of feelings of shame or guilt amongst the user base at UMD vs Splosh that was evident in the regularity of, "why I'm leaving posts," (short version either they're feeling shame/guilt or they've been harassed) and other posts driven by unresolved guilt and shame. The thing is you can only really tackle people's unaddressed guilt/shame issues by being able to talk more about them just having more porn doesn't help people address those issues (they just continue to keep having post-masturbatory guilt/shame well into their middle age until they eventually decide that and the porn was the cause of all their problems and then become an evangelical no-fapper). Unfortunately whilst those feelings of shame and guilt remain unaddressed each post declaring they're leaving or is predicated on that shame or guilt plants another seed in the minds of those also struggling with the same issues and makes it more likely that they too will leave for the same reasons in the future.

And so this to me comes full circle back around to my point about whatever content takes up the majority of the main forum inevitably sets the tone for how people interact with the site as a whole. If the main forum is 80% posts selling porn clips a small handful of discussion points and the occasional "why I leaving," posts whilst the likes of Messy Minds posts have been shoved in a corner somewhere then it says to users we're a marketplace first and a community second which will inevitably affect how people decide to interact with the site.



Anyway I've personally bollocked on enough already so I'll try keep the response to this bit short but I don't see how "following" stores is that tricky for users. It's practically how many social media networks operate. You want to receive tweets from x person then on Twitter you have to follow them. Want to receive all updates from a given store, follow them. Having personally run a number of ventures outside of WAM as the manager of them I always found it more preferable to have a mailing list or list of subscribers I knew were interested in what I had to offer that I had more confidence wanted to receive what I was about to send them and I could even send exclusive deals to than blanket spamming everyone on a particular site and risking annoying either its admins, mods or other people not interested. Now granted to get new customers and followers you do occasionally need to do that (hence why I suggested there would be a set number of posts they can make to all users in a certain time frame that could be used to advertise a sale or scenes previews coming up in the next few weeks etc).

The suggested alternative of blocking producers that post too much I think is worse off for both producers and users. In terms of producers lets say a new producer starts out and they're posting way too much on something you're not a fan of and so you block them. If they then receive feedback they should post less frequently and they change their content style to something you may actually enjoy how will they ever be able to let you know they've done that if you've blocked everything from them. Blocking should be reserved for moderating and getting rid of people being abusive/harassing. Furthermore the mentality of going down the route of let people manage their content by blocking it usually goes hand in hand with the idea that if they can now block it then get rid of all post restrictions on spamming and leave it to the user to deal with. If you've ever joined a Discord server with hundreds of channels that the admin hasn't set to either, "mute all," or "only at everyone" for notifications by default will realise that this is the user experience equivalent of being repeatedly punched in the face as you get notifications from every single post in every single channel until you go through every channel one at a time and turn off its notifications. It's a nightmare that more often than not has people leaving the server for somewhere better managed.

Even Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations recognised that there were times that regulation was necessary. If he were alive today he would not impressed with what some people profess to peddle as capitalism that is nothing of the sort. As far as he would be concerned too many countries have allowed too many markets to have become oligopolies or effective monopolies to produce a desirable outcome. Furthermore he'd despair at both sides of the political spectrum for such outcome, too many on the left looking for any excuse to blame capitalism and too many on the right looking to game the system to ensure their donors can maintain/increase market share in markets that should have been broken up long ago.

Anyway to get back on topic I take it that under your "let producers do what they want," zero regulation proposition that they should be free to sell the personal details to companies that trade in user information (given that such transactions are typically anonymous you'd never know who did the selling so there would be no consumer backlash to such practice were it to be permitted) or should there be rules and regulations to prevent that?

If so then can we stop dealing in meaningless political mantras and discuss the actual issue at hand sensibly.

True, but isn't that precisely the point of the filtering system? If there's a disproportionately high number of posts about a gender you don't wish to view, you can filter it. That's likely a result of the market/sales of female-based clips being higher (a guess from a non-producer obv).


Cut the above a bit since responses are getting to be page-length+, but first and foremost - thank you for an insightful and informative post about these issues. I'm glad Splosh forum was able to help you process your issues early on, and I hope (through peer discussion or professional counseling) that you've reached a state of comfort with your fetish. FWIW, I've got some residual guilt/bit of sexual repression, maybe from WAM, maybe from other things, but I've reached a decent state of mind from both peer discussions over the years as well as a therapist, who was more than happy to discuss WAMs impact on me (and who gave me a good laugh when they clearly did research between sessions, having little to no idea what WAM was initially. But that was years ago, so to be fair, I'm not in a position where I personally need to have these discussions anymore. For people that do still have those issues to a serious degree, I hope they can have those discussions (though I would hope they would not base their sanity on forum discussion alone but would try to incorporate professional help as well if feasible). However, though I agree that there's value in such discussions, I don't think it's on the UMD to be more like the Splosh forum. There are resources on the site other than the main Messy forum for more intimate or niche discussion. There is also the freedom to start a forum or Group where you think people would be more comfortable having such discussions. The presence of commercial activity on the Messy forum shouldn't have an impact on that.


Maybe I'm overly hopeful/naive, but I refuse to accept that as a fait accompli. This site is more than just the Messy forum. Maybe more awareness needs to be made about Groups, because they're a great way to focus on smaller issues. If people aren't willing to explore the breadth of resources available on the site and instead judge the site's attitude based on one forum, sorry but that's on them.

WARNING - small rant incoming - This is more of a personal one for me, but I fucking loathe the use of "porn" as a term of disfavor versus "clean" WAM. How old and outdated is a strict definition of "porn" as ONLY material with explicit depiction of sex? Fetish material/erotica is porn. Full stop. The distinction some people seem to bend over backwards to try to draw is mind-boggling to me, that the notion they (gasp) might be producing or viewing "porn" is abhorrent to them, even though they're producing clothed fetish material and heavily marketing it to a niche fetish community. If you know or should reasonably be aware that the vast majority of people buying your produced material are doing so for the sake of sexual arousal, guess what? You're producing porn. AND THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. Have we truly gotten to where we are in terms of accepting the wide spectrum of sexuality (and yes, there's still a ways to go, but there's progress) but still want to treat "porn" as a bad word? If you want to argue legal distinction/associated issues, that's one thing, you have to work with the system in place, but at least as far as discussions like this go, it truly baffles me that the notion that a fetish forum being 80% "selling porn clips" is a bad thing (maybe I'm reading too deep, but you could have just said "selling clips" there, you went beyond commercial activity)
/rant

I would kindly ask you not to project your assumptions onto me or to strawman my arguments. I have produced porn. I have starred in porn. I have even given oral arguments to Home Office workers working on anti-porn measures in support of porn and against the then plans for a porn block. I have no issue with ethically produced and distributed porn. Please do not try to insinuate that I do. When I use the term porn, whether it is for clothed fetish material or hardcore, I do not use it with any judgements or to convey any pejorative intent but as a simple descriptor/catch all term for adult content. As is readily apparent I'm a rather wordy blowhard and as such if I intend to express contempt for something it won't be insinuated but explicit, profane and exceptionally wordy...

All I am trying to get across is that for better or for worse the UMD is now pretty much the only place for the WAM Community to congregate online. Not everyone in the WAM Community is looking to purchase loads of WAM content. Some are looking for people to talk to whether that be for practical advice or just mentally trying to get to grips with it all and other perhaps may be wanting to reach out and find others to meet up with. Naturally the list of reasons here is non-exhaustive and many other motives will exist. Given the diversity in motivations do I think the main messy chat that is already about 80% commercialised posts should have even more commercialised posts for sales then no I don't think that would be a good thing. It is my belief that with too much focus on commercialisation the community side (shoved pretty much to the periphery {side note: arguments about well they already have their own little sections apply equally to most commercial posts, the Store front page lists latest scenes and bundles to be added that the same argument could be applied to them not being reposted in the main forum I'm not necessarily saying I advocate that but wanted to point out the hidden hypocrisy of the point}) has suffered and that the lack of community development plays a role in multiple issues ranging from regular posts of people leaving out of shame/guilt to whether women feel comfortable in the forums.

A community depends on people to try look out for the needs of as many of its members and their interests as possible. If the prevailing attitude is well the status quo works for me and anyone who doesn't feel the same is wrong then the community spirit is already long dead. All I am trying to argue for is before deciding to allow yet more commercial posts in the main forum to consider whether the current balance of posts already there is to the benefit or detriment of the whole community and not just those whose sole reason to be here is to sell or purchase content.

I do apologize that the rant section did not clarify - though my read of your use of "porn" (apparently mistaken) was what prompted the rant, I did not mean to focus it on you specifically. There have been a few posts the last few months that had me almost writing that response, and as this is the first time in a while I participated in a bit of discourse on this forum, I found myself launching into it. No personal offense intended, it was meant to be a general rant which I read as applicable contextually, apologies for the misread.

As to the rest, I think we're getting pretty cyclical, so I'll respectfully disagree and what will be, will be. If you think those topics are unreasonably underrepresented, I hope you are successful in taking steps to change that. I've outlined what I think are the resources besides the Messy forum to do so, but if your concern is solely on the Messy forum, so be it. Best of luck in your future endeavors.

Exactly, it's MM's business and he can do what he wants. And what he wants is to keep one or two producers from spamming out the Messy forum so that posts made an hour ago have been lost to the second page of the forums.

This is interesting, because admittedly, I mostly come on here these days looking for content, and yet, I'm actually with @Potatoman-J, @DungeonMasterOne, etc on the other side of this debate in that I think limiting the advertising of sales is necessary.

As @Messmaster pointed out, a "sale" is supposed to be special. It's an event. So only doing them a few times a year seems completely reasonable to me. But we aren't even talking about limiting people's ability to DO sales. We're just talking about limiting their ability to *advertise* them. Which I think is important and necessary, because as others have pointed out, we would most likely have a major spam problem otherwise.

In a perfect world, we'd be able to advertise whatever we want, as often as we'd like on here, but I think if we're being honest, we all know that there are producers who would abuse that, and to be honest, I don't even think most of them would be doing it from a shrew business perspective. Put simply, I think there are a lot of producers on here who aren't even self-aware enough to understand, let alone respect, the relationship between the content they make and the audience for it. So safe gaurds need to be put in place, otherwise things could get out of control spammy in a hurry.

I also think it's critical that the rules and structure around here continue to be geared towards the benefit of the community, and not towards the benefit of producers. And I say that as both a producer with a store here, and as a community member who primarily comes to this site specifically for content.

For me, in the early days, finding other people that were into what I was into was a salvation, where-as nowadays, I have my close slime friends and communicate with them on other more personal platforms, and I come here specifically as a perv excitedly hoping to find that there's a new video of Sky getting glopped on @Mostwam, or that @MessyGirl has put another girl in @Scroggle's Human Garbage Disposal, or that there's a new video from a new store of a new model getting green slimed, etc.

But even though I'm on here mostly for content these days, there's new people coming here every day who are still in that "discovering I'm not alone in the universe" phase, and this is one of the only places they can do that. It's also one of the only places where we can have engaging conversations like the one is this thread. So we need to protect that as best as we can.


Also wanna echo what @Messy_Mr said here. This is a very interesting subject and I very much appreciate hearing everybody's perspectives.

Also, I slipped in slime and tore my MCL earlier and am currently laid up on painkillers, so apologies if this post doesn't make sense or rambled in chaos

Exactly! And where we run into trouble here is when a sound sales strategy is employed by someone who doesn't understand business, or doesn't understand their audience, or worse yet, doesn't understand either.

I totally get where @Duffman is coming from in regards to this potentially being a "sky is falling" overreaction, but I think what makes it an actual concern is, as @soundguy pointed out, there's a lot of producers who don't have a strong understanding of how to run a business. Which makes sense, as this is (or at least should be) a pursuit of passion, not a business project. But too many producers look at a lack of sales and say "people aren't seeing my content" versus "I'm not seeing the people that would like my content".

Or worse yet..."I'm not making content that people want to see..."

But to recognize that takes objectivity and self-awareness, which are hard to come by when you're blinded by your own taste (I'm as guilty of that as anyone).

Not to mention how personal it feels on an emotional level to have your work rejected by your own community.

And so the default response to a...lack of response, is usually to assume that you weren't heard.

Which in turn promotes being louder/more frequent...

...Which is all a long way of saying, the "chicken little" fear here isn't just that if we had no limits on advertising, the forum would be cluttered with spammy posts from all the producers. It's that the forum would be overrun with spammy posts from producers who are (unfortunately) specifically not very good at understanding how to engage with their audience, and how to properly utilize this forum to promote their work, and whose efforts are (almost certainly) not going to generate any net positive for them (sales/revenue) or the community (that is already rejecting their content/advertising).

Or maybe a better way of saying that is, you never see quiet people being told "shhhhhh!" in a library.

This is INCREDIBLY insightful, and honestly, it deserves it's own post and should be stickied somewhere on the forum or site. The relationship between shame/guilt about this fetish, and how it affects a person's behavior, is zenith of almost every single problem in our community. And up until now I never realized how large a part advertising/promoting content could effect that. This totally would explain why there seems to be a generational gap in terms of people who are comfortable with their kinks.



I think this actually goes back to what @theStickyTrickser mentioned re; shame.

The people who bend over backwards to draw that (absurd) distinction between porn and "clean WAM" are usually the ones who are most uncomfortable with their kinks (and more over, uncomfortable with themselves). Ideally, drawing that imaginary line in the sand helps them eventually get over that, but either way, the reason they don't want to recognize their content as porn isn't because they think porn is bad. It's becuase they think that *they* are bad, and in order to feel good (or at least better) about their dirty little kink, they need for there to be something worse.

I.E, If I felt guilty about dumping the green slime on models, I would need to vilify something more explicit to feel better about it. (P.S., I do NOT feel even one bit guilty about glopping those girls )

So the reason some people do that annoying thing of drawing an absurd distinction over what's smut and what isn't is more a reflection of how they feel about themselves and their kinks, and less about how they feel about sexually explicit content.

AND to bring it all full circle, conversations like this are EXACTLY what help get people over those insecurities. So thank you @Duffman for starting (and continuing) this thread

So my suggestion of letting producers run their business how they want has degenerated into some strawman attack on other non-sequitur hypotheticals. Ok... whatever.

True... but then why bother having the discussion at all? Clearly that's not the intent of this thread. Unless you can show me data that a few producers are responsible for "spamming" 50% of the content? If that's the case, some kind of throttling as opposed to hard arbitrary caps make more sense.

UMD has been increasingly "advertising" over the decades... has that driven people away from the site? Has there been a sharp decline in traffic that I wasn't aware of?

So you are now proposing regulations over hypothetical/speculations instead. Ok...

As for the triggered remark that is totally non-sequitur and such personal attacks are out of line. Not once did I mention PTSD, so please keep your biases to yourself and stop projecting it onto others. Thanks.

No worries dude, apology accepted. Totally understand everything that precipitated it. @KelseyRose did a much better job than I would have articulating its connection to shame above so I'll defer to that post, though if I can will briefly add that having explored a few different kink communities it sometimes it amazes me the extent of the mental gymnastics some people try to go to justify what they're doing/like is nothing like all the stuff they disapprove of.

But anyway yeah once you've worked through things issues like guilt or societies disapproval of porn but then continue to see others bringing that theme up it can be a bit like wading through that river of negative emotionally charged slime running under New York in Ghostbusters 2 (is this the point where I realise a whole generation is staring at me blankly I swear I wasn't even 1 when it came out, I watched it on something called a DVD ) and that with each post more accumulates until eventually oh FFS yet another one. I totally understand that feeling, its what I mean by the unease I have with the under-current of guilt/shame.

I'm already aware of many of the other resources besides the Messy forum. Indeed I think I spend more time responding in Messy Minds than anywhere else as I'd like to do something about it. I mean behind each of those posts of guilt, shame or discomfort with porn etc is a member of our community suffering as a result of the total head scramble society has tried with all of us. They're unlikely to get help from anywhere else coming to terms with their interest in sploshing with the exception of specifically seeking out a kink-positive therapist. As such each of those "I'm leaving," posts (granted by the time someone has posted one of these they've usually already committed to taking such action) to a certain extent represents a community failure.

Now I don't have a huge amount of spare time on my hands and because of my Dyspraxia I'm awful at expressing myself concisely but I hope to try what I can to preach the cause of shameless sploshing and hopefully add a little positively charge emotion to the river of slime and make it more welcoming for all to bathe in. Now I won't change that whole river myself but if I've done what I can and helped a few people then that's good enough. Never make perfect the enemy of good enough as a few is always better than none.

A strawman is a deliberate misrepresentation of a person's argument in an attempt to defeat an easier argument rather than the point they made.

You literally said:


You did not say "let them advertise as many sales as they like." You said, "let producers do want they want." Therefore it is a legitimate argument against that point to ask whether you would be in favour of allowing producers to sell their customer data (as many other companies can and do - hence why the EU brought in GDPR) if "they want." It is not a strawman but an examination of the logic of the exact point you wrote.

Furthermore if you wish to attempt to justify no regulations by appealing "the free market," then it is equally valid to point out that the theoretical framework that demonstrated how free markets produce optimal outcomes depended on and assumed a number of basic regulations. Indeed that framework specifically argues against zero regulations as it permits a whole bunch of anti-competitive practices such as price fixing and cartels. Minimal regulations doesn't mean no regulations. Attempts to use the free market, to justify zero regulations either demonstrates a lack of understanding of their underlying theory or a deliberate attempt to mislead - either way the error should be corrected as it is a fallacy with long reaching public policy consequences.


Strawman example 1:


Not a single person in this thread is arguing against WAM content. The argument is over how often producers should be able to advertise their content in the main discussion forum. It is an issue of advertisements and/or spam along with its consequences on the nature of discussion in the messy forum.

Strawman example 2:


Silver_sea did not say you mentioned PTSD. Silver_sea was informing you of the origin of the term "triggered" that you used and that given its origin and that some people may find it insensitive that using it to flippantly dismiss those you disagree with undermines what until now has been a relatively constructive discussion.

And on the point of this being a constructive discussion I would like to kindly suggest that responding to points people disagree with glib remarks or making accusations is indeed does threaten to undermine this so far constructive discussion. Let's try remain on track with that constructive discussion by continuing to be respectful of people's opinions and focus future comments solely to the question of how many times should producers be allowed to advertise their sales in the messy forum? Not how many sales should they be able to run? Not whether people should be able to buy or post messy content? But how many times they may advertise sales within a year?

Since I have to point it out this is the part of your post I was referring too: "zero regulation proposition that they should be free to sell the personal details to companies that trade in user information (given that such transactions are typically anonymous you'd never know who did the selling so there would be no consumer backlash to such practice were it to be permitted) or should there be rules and regulations to prevent that?"

We're talking about limiting producers post... and you're talking about privacy issues. Great way to twist my words.


Yes it is a strawman because any reasonable person knows we are talking about limiting post, not privacy issues. I'm sorry if you cannot understand things in context.


No regulations, again on this 2 sales per year discussion. Again, read things in context. Nice try to twist the issue.


While my question was rhetorical... this is a good point because I am questioning why is this even a discussion point? Show me the evidence that we have an epidemic of spammy posts.


No, you have been injecting your biases into this discussion and I've basically pointed you to stop it. None of your posts in response to mine has been particularly constructive.

On the other hand I'm questioning why is this issue of 2 sales per year even an issue? Most people seem to be arguing from their point of view of what sales should be... again my point it's not your business. Let producers run their ship how they want it to be. Instead the core of the issue seems to be about perceived spam, which I am questioning if it's really a legit concern. And if it's a concern, a throttling approach make more sense because that does not directly infringe on their ability to do business.

You can choose to disagree with me. Instead you and others make personal attacks.

If this place turns into advertising only with no other content then I imagine people will leave as it will lose it's community spirit.

Regulations is a deliberately strong word, nice try in making me look bad buuuuut you failed. All I suggested is that sales/advertising should be in a separate forum. Not really that hard or regulatory.

Using glib terms out of context can be harmful, I suggest you stop it as it's bad for those that know what 'triggering' is and shows quite the ignorance on your part...including the use of the terms 'biases' and 'projecting'...again, completely misused to try to attack.

You are nothing but a troll, consider this your only feeding, I will be ignoring all posts from you from this point on.

What's ironic is that I'm actually not in favor of the commercialization of posts on UMD. We used to had more candid WAM stuff over 10 years ago, and over 20+ years ago we had much less producer content and so more varied content. But I don't let my personal biases and feelings cloud the issue at hand, which I do see as a heavy-handed way of limiting producer business activity. You can dispute the semantics of "regulation", it doesn't change the point though.

I can concede that from a quality of service standpoint... yes we should throttle. In the example that a producer is using a bot to promote sales every hour that would be warranted, but I'm not convinced this is the situation we are facing.

I'm also against the idea of separate forums, and this will segment the community even further. We already have the forums 'Group'. Is that a good idea? These groups receive much less traffic and attention than the main forum. Filters based on a sales tag might be a better option as people can opt out of it, just like how we have filters for male/female/co-ed.

From the way you have been personally attacking me, we will agree to disagree.

@Ichris001 I only argue with people when I consider there might be a possibility of further truths being learnt or useful solutions being uncovered. I don't believe continuing this to be a profitable use of time. If winning the argument is so important to your self-esteem I am happy to declare you the winner so that the matter can be closed. If you wish to try re-open it you will just be wasting your own time as I don't intend to spend any more time on the matter.

Now I suggest getting back to the discussion point on hand.

Whilst I have been arguing in favour of keeping some sort of restriction on the number of sales posts there can be and trying to not allow commercial posts to completely overrun the entire messy forum I am conscious of the fact that if I think of the number of holidays/special days that many shops like to use to run a sale (Xmas/New Years, Black Friday, Halloween, Valentines Day etc etc) that there are a few more than 2 in the year.

Could a compromise position be achieved? How about for a specifically selected number of holidays an admin or moderator posts a Holiday Sales Thread and it is made Sticky at the top of the forum for the week leading up to and following said holiday in which producers are permitted to post an advertisement for their sale without it counting towards their 2 sales advertisement posts per year?

Any sales advertisement posted outside the designated Holiday Sales Thread counts towards their 2 sales advertisement posts per year. Perhaps a list of the holidays that have been selected to have Holiday Sales Thread for that year could be stickied in the Store Owners forum so producers are able to plan ahead or around them. Would also prevent a producer posting before any Holiday Sales Thread was created from claiming ignorance about it and that their post outside it shouldn't count as they would have waited to post in the thread had they known.

A solution like this gives a little more flexibility for producers on how many sales they can advertise, especially around holidays, whilst not massively increasing the number of threads devoted to them and might even be beneficial to users to be able to browse all on-going sales in a single thread.

Sticking purely to the sales subject (and noting that this thread is misnamed - people can run as many sales as they want, they just can't post about them in the forums more than twice per year), and having thought about it a bit more, I'm firmly of the "it's not broke, don't try and fix it" point of view.

Sales hurt producers. As soon as people notice that given producers have regular sales, that's the only time they'll ever buy anything, resulting in a loss of revenue, which ultimately hurts all of us in less material being produced. This would be even worse if sales ended up tied to fixed and well known holidays (not to mention the potential downsides of which ones to pick). So they definitely aren't something that should be widely advertised all the time. Rather, sales should be seen as rewards for loyal customers, who make a point of checking a producer's store or sites on a regular basis.

Every producer gets to do a full graphical post of every scene they produce, twice if they have two stores or sites. Those, and especially their preview images, definitely count as WAM content and bring value to the forums. One-line posts about sales, or sales posts that only contain images that have already been posted on scene promos? Those don't really add value, but they take up a slot and push everyone else's content down a place. Twice a year at a time of the producer's chosing is fair enough. But really, we don't need more than that.

OK lemme dive in. Thanks for everybody's input. Sadly, having no set number is a nonstarter. Many producers have settled upon this forum as their main or only means of advertisement and without some reasonable limits put in place, it can easily collapse under its own weight. It became obvious that we needed to have some sort of maximum because producers would just use sales as an easy loophole to plug their sites again and again. If today we said go ahead and do whatever you want, this place would be a mess in a week. I'd be in a constant battle with producers angry that their post was removed and not someone else's, and I wouldn't even be able to quote a solid or consistent reason. We just need concrete rules when it comes to something like this.

I haven't heard any convincing arguments yet that it needs to be more than two times a year (though my mind is still open). I don't think you automatically need to run a sale on the holidays or every time you get WOTD. Two sales for two weeks each = one full month of the year you're running a sale.


Well they already are the general spam rules. But as far as enforcement, I don't think an item being flagged or not should be a prerequisite to take action. If I notice it myself I'll do something about it because sometimes nobody flags! And they'll just keep getting away with it until eventually they think it's just okay (this already happens a lot).


I considered automating a page that just listed all stores currently running a sale. Would be easy to do, but a complete spam magnet. Who would ever NOT be running a sale when they could just make their sale permanent and be a mainstay on that page (or that forum). Sales should be run for a reason, not just to get up on another page.


Yup, producers can change the prices of their items 1000 times a day and I don't care. They likely won't be able to plug them again since they were already plugged when launched, and sales don't reset that. Switching your whole store into sale mode is a different beast so that's where I'm asking for a maximum of two storewide sales (or whatever number we settle on) a year, and you can plug that


This.


If you're counting on business acumen to deter people from spamming, then you've got another thing coming


I'm all about "the more the merrier" too. How can we complain about more free content!? The thing is that we will hit a point of diminishing returns before you know it. Some producers will escalate their promo game against each other really quickly and then complain of unfairness whenever they are ever asked to pump the breaks. It's not just more redundant content for you to wade through, there will also be a mountain of moderation that we must do, and resentment from whoever was moderated without being given a decisive rule that they actually broke.


I think by saying "It's MM's business" he meant that the UMD is a private business, not just a free market per se. Decisions that people make while they are here (for advertising and such) must also fit the overall business model of this site, which means playing well with other producers. You also cannot assume that decisions made on the front-end are not massively affecting my daily workflow on the backend. I only spend maybe 10% of my time interacting with and moderating the community and 90% developing code and trying to keep these servers up. My time is not free and all these decisions really do affect my ability to focus on running the site.


I think something like the 80/20 rule would apply here. Meaning that 80% of the plugs come from 20% of the producers. That's just the how the universe always works no matter what our rules are. I believe throttling is technically the same thing as an arbitrary cap as they both limit the rate of posting, no?


The advertising has increased but so have posts in general. I believe that the ratio of plugs to normal convo has been roughly the same over the decades, mostly due to our rules about double-posting, limits on sales, etc. It's not hypothetical; These rules exist because we had issues in the first place. To be honest, the decline in traffic wouldn't be the most noticeable issue. It's the decline in morale among producers and visitors alike who feel like certain aggressive producers are getting over on things.


I really don't think we had more varied or candid content in 2001 than we do now. We used to dream of a day when wam went mainstream, and now we have seasoned professionals and amateurs with iPhones alike, and free Videos pages where you can view tons of stuff. It's free because the commercialization of the site makes that possible. Somebody has to pay the bills so you have a site to enjoy.


Elegant solution, but really these rules have to be dead simple. Putting in different exceptions and things like that will make it increasingly hard to keep everyone on the same page. I'm all for less rules not more. I say let's just decide on a number and follow that. I personally think 2 is enough, but 3 could be reasonable. I really don't want us to wear out the term "sale" until it means "regular price." To me, that makes it a lie.

Very much that.

There are sites I used to buy from but the way they often have sales is just annoying from the point of view of a customer so I end up stopping buying from them and then stop looking at their website altogether. I can't be bothered to keep an eye out for when they next have a sale which includes the scenes I want because it might be tomorrow or it might not be until next year.

It lowers the value of their content and if someone needs to frequently lower their prices under the guise of a sale, that probably means their standard prices are too high.

Sales are good for passing customers but it's paid for by regular customers.

tl;dr I'm glad I don't have to make decisions about such things because it's complicated and you're never going to please everyone.

If prices are right in the first place then everything will be great and everyone is happy. That's the real answer.