Can't speak for tapas since I haven't investigated how they programmed forums. But I have seen it happen with many clients.
Some create a super fancy system that is so complex it is hard to modify in a short time while others prefer to save money creating a mess of the coding.
If they went traditional html5 coding (meaning php, java, sql, etc. Modifications are possible) then all it would take is for tapas directors to approve the suggestion.
The promo threads only really work if you're popular. I got more reads on Tapas by simply existing and occasionally promoting than spamming people.
You can create your own blog and advertise on facebook or pay for adds. There is no cheap way to promote yourself unless you have the patience.
Pretty much, yeah. I'd HOPE they follow the basic guidelines anyone would with a bit of web dev education under their belt, but who knows.
If it was that bad though, I'd hope they'd have the code rewritten anyway, just to be up with the times and for the sake of any possible upgrades and changes in the future.
That's true forums are mainly to get advice. Only a few authors truly promote their work successfully.
The rest just get sub 4 sub on the forums.
Agreed.
The only difference we'd have is that there'd be less clusters of the exact same things being promoted on a multitude of threads. The average promo poster will come in, spam post on 4 or 5 different threads the exact same copy/paste, and then leave. All 5 of those threads are then sitting at the top of the forums. So you go in to see what's available and in every thread it's the same mess of the same posts. It's a headache and just totally redundant.
We'd still have a sea of threads of promotion, but if it's single-title based, we won't have the issue of duplicates, and instead of having to scour a post full of a billion promos for anything interesting, we can more easily scroll thread titles for interest.
I don't know if anyone here is old enough to remember, but I used to work on the forum code for GaiaOnline.
That was a nightmare.
Jokes on you! I am way older not even knowing what GaiaOnline is. In my days we used to go to libraries. 🤣🤣🤣🤣
I feel that in my soul.
I remember when the cool kids were the ones who went to the rollerskating rink on weekends.
pretty sure i'm old enough to remember gaiaonline (i still remember dial up, AOL and AIM) but i can only imagine the legwork and brain work it took to maintain the forums there
if feel like as close as it's come in recent years would be geocities spiritual successor neocities which has decent community from what i've seen and lots of niches so i don't doubt there's space for web fiction and comics
Oh yeah. I haven't tried the blog avenue since I honestly don't have the patience for a newsletter-type thing, but I do ads all the time. My thought was basically a promo forum for all web novel writers. It definitely gets tedious promoting only to writers but when it comes to traffic and revenue, their money is still good. haha.
Possibly having those fixed promo threads for every season (spring, summer, fall, winter) might help organize the promo threads without a thousands scrolling. Though, again that might be difficult execution too. I agree with that limiting the amount of promos/day would be nice.
Out of curiosity, I roughly counted active threads within last 30 days:
* Art thread : 80
* Writing threads: 50
* Review and Feedback : 50
* Promo threads : 170
So fun fact, currently the number of active promo threads is roughly equal to active art, writing and review/feedback threads combined on tapas forum. What a number!
It would definitely take a lot of work to straighten out. In one forum I mod, writers are only allowed two posts per week, though linktrees are allowed. We had the same problems with people copying redundant posts. It was a lot.
Statistics! You know the way to my heart…
I feel like those numbers alone should be enough to get the moderators to at least do SOMETHING. 
Yeah, pretty much what we did in my old community. We had something like 3k active users and the only way we could get the promotion stuff down was limiting users to only one thread per promo, and just updating that one thread per day.
I've been watching a lot of BookTuber videos lately and the history of online web fiction communities is bonkers.
Even then it would be up to whoever is in charge of tapas. A company can't do much without aproval of those on top. It is good and bad at the same time.
Good since no dumb decisions can be made by the workers but bad since no good decisions can be done.
Hi, masters in computer engineering with a focus on cybersec and 10 years industry experience here. The solutions you're proposing are considered blacklisting and don't work. You can put restrictions on to prevent title matches, but then people will just start changing titles. This is why we generally don't use black listing in cybersec, it's too easy to work around. A whitelist would be better, i.e. an approved list of whats allowed to be posted, and THEN it can only be allowed once. This prevents a user or bot from just spamming different titles, because the duplicates won't be whitelisted.
