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.
Yup. Pretty much all we can do is submit it as a update suggestion and hope for the best. Since they're pushing the discord, nothing will happen
This isn't a cybersecurity issue. This is just data processing. I do understand what you're referring to, but I think for something as simple as processing and filtering data for a forum, it's fine. White listing also has issues.
(insert various credentials that make me valid as a professional opinion).
It is literally a cybersec problem if you're dealing with bots and spam.
Yes, I politely dropped my credentials. Thank you for noticing.
I think it would be great to get rid of all the promo threads which people start
in other categories. You can hide the promo category, that´s what people also
use the "announcement" and other categories to start new promo threads.
I love the idea of having 4 promo threads but I don´t see a realistic way to do
it and I also think that it would lead to people opening up even more promo threads
in disguise under the other categories and I don´t want that
It drives me crazy when people do that in the writing category. I get really excited thinking it's a thread I can participate in and it's some game for a promo thread.
We're not talking about bots spamming because that's... not an issue.
Hey man, I don't even think I've ever talked to you, but you're coming off really pretentious.
So I'm gonna politely end this conversation.
Haven't see noticed it until yesterday perhaps I was really blind lol
The sheer amount of promoting threads is really insane, it really is like the most of the forums topics.
I only see that when I look at the forum on my mobile phone because I can´t log in on the mobile, s
so I can´t hide any category.
On some days it´s only promotion threads when someone comments in every topic and you have to
scroll forever to find other threads.
I'm using the desktop version but I remember yesterday when I came to forums and saw promotions from the top to the bottom, that was the first time I really realized how much of it is going on. I mean I can understand it but on the other hand there's so little else going on 
I feel like one of the worst aspects of the forum promo threads is when somebody comes online and posts the same thing in every. single. promo thread all in one go, so every other topic gets pushed down as suddenly 20+ Promo threads are at the top of the forum because the same person has posted "READ MY NOVEL [LINK]" in all of them in the space of 20 minutes.
I actually have in the past played a game with some discord friends, where you had to screencap the longest stack of threads with the same person's avatar on the end. The "highest scoring" ones couldn't be contained in a single screenshot because we legitimately saw somebody bumping close to 30 promo threads in the space of less than an hour (at which point, we stopped playing the game because it stopped being funny and started being annoying).
I feel like maybe just limiting how much people can create these threads would potentially work, since, most people who make these threads have by now realised the secret to having an effective promo post is to be the person who starts the thread. Because the only posts serial promo thread users tend to look at are the OP's and the last one, especially once threads are over about five posts, and plus the people making promo threads tend to frame it with language like they're doing everyone a favour, like "Here you go! A promo thread for you to get seen!", "Promotion is hard, so here's a place for all you hard-working creators to get noticed!" and so people will often look at their work or sub as a gesture of thanks for doing them this "favour", apparently unaware that OP isn't really doing them a favour, they're really just promoting themselves (note: I'm sure some people who start promo threads aren't aware of this, but when somebody keeps starting them, they're sure to have noticed the pattern and aren't just doing it innocently any more.).
It's pretty obvious from how rarely anyone posts in that "milestone celebration thread that killed all the others" which was created after things got really silly with everyone making "celebration!" threads, that people are very aware that it was nothing to do with celebrating and just an excuse to create a thread, since being a thread OP and "inviting" people to "celebrate" or "participate" by sharing their links is a really good way to get views on your own work by somebody already viewing you with the mindset of a party guest who owes the host something.
So maybe promo threads need to require a reason to be created like "I'd like to create a thread for Autism Awareness month where people can promote comics and novels featuring characters on the spectrum, or by autistic creators" or "I want to make a thread about isekai stories, the old one auto-locked months ago" ....The problem is, of course... the forums are already kind of understaffed as-is, and I don't want poor Joanne to need to sift through everyone's promo thread applications. 
