That sounds a lot less chaotic at the very least

Nah, it's fine as-is because you can just opt to hide promotions as a category. You can't do the same on discord. But it's cool to have new promotion threads since you can make them to fit different topics or have a little promo mini-game.

The only thing I'd like to see though is a rule that says you can only promote your own stuff maximum 5x a day (and let forum users report anyone violating that rule). One of the reasons I ended up muting the promo category was because of people drive-by spamming their novel/comic in 25 different promo threads. Nobody is going to be enticed by your 25 generic copy-pasted "read my novel!!!!!!" posts, dog.

I think it's a good idea but honestly hard to manage. I've noticed that creators, especilly newer creators, to tend tunnel vision when it comes to promoting their new work in a forum-like setting. I can't count how many threads I've seen in the past couple years tagged "new episode alert". I do support limiting how often someone can promote like @Mallory suggested or have the occasional "off-topic" promo threads for people who have stuff off Tapas they want to showcase.

Honestly, I'm 50-50 on this idea. While I do tend to get annoyed at the floods of new promo threads, I also don't want to block the whole category from my forums feed because I do scroll through the threads to get some new things to read sometimes. I wonder if the whole idea of reducing the number of threads will actually help though. I mean, will it make it so that all the other promo threads will be closed/deleted? I definitely understand how chaotic the self-promotions are though, because I just woke up to dozens of posts on the promotions category

I'm relatively new here, but even in my short time I've noticed an issue of threads being lost and accidentally ignored beneath/between all the promos, especially when a single person goes through and copy/pastes their pitch into 10 threads all at once (which seems to be the norm). Personally, I like the idea of dedicated genre threads that way potential readers also know where to go to find their interests... which is the entire point of the promos anyways. The dedicated genres also inherently limits the number of promo posts someone can do, which is helpful.

My main concern about this is how it will be managed. Will moderators lock creation of new promotion threads and just have the few suggested permanently active? Or will it all have to be user-driven? Because that feels untenable...

I already have the promotion category blocked, but I'd consider unblocking it if there were more control/restrictions around it.

Hmm.

I think what I'd do (I doubt the mods care about any of our opinions, but I digress, lol), is make it so each person can only have a single promo thread for each of their work. If they update, they post in that associated thread that they've updated.

For me, the bigger issue is that there are TONS of the same things posted in a bajillion different threads. It's so common for one single person to post 4, 5, 8 friggin' times in different promo threads. It's entirely redundant to do.

Instead, let them each have a thread dedicated to their work, and they can't post outside of that thread if to promote said work. It also allows people to more easily follow news and updates about their favorites.

It's fine. In my experience promo forums don't really work as people would like. Since a lot of the time it creates phantom fandom.

On the other hand, I will promote my story once I publish it, but I won't spam each forum since I see no point in it.
And I honestly don't have the time to do a sub 4 sub scenario. It helps a lot but if I sub to something I want to be able to read it and truly help the author.
If I can't read it (due to my limited time) I don't think I am really helping them.

I do know that helping them reach 100 subs is a lot of help but I want to truly help them and not just phantom help them.

Having said that, there is nothing wrong with being a phantom sub/follower. I just feel the point of being an author is making the day of at least one person and personally I value more a dedicated fan over a sub. But that's just me. Some authors value more subs.

Getting back on topic, I have noticed that forums that have like 1k posts don't really help with your promo. Mainly because new members that join the forum don't have the time or patience to read all 1000 messages and to sub to each and every comic/novel.

Something I don't like from the promos I see here is that most members just promo to promo without having a target audience. For example, if you promote your last chapter without explaining what your story is about, then you won't truly create an interest.
Marketing should always be done with a target audience in mind, not just spamming without a target.

That's what I'm saying, though.

Most people spam a multitude of threads.

If they each have a single thread they can only use for their product, then they can't spam. Hell, put a limit on one update post a day and you're solid. It works really well. I used to moderate a pretty heavily populated community of artists back in the day and it was the method we used, and it was really nice and orderly because of it.

People are already getting lost in seas of promo threads, but they're getting lost in a sea of promo comments IN the sea of promo threads on top of it.

There's literally always going to be people who will try and game any system you come up with. That's just how communities are. And no solution is going to be perfect. But we can potentially find the most optimal solution.

Fake accounts and bots don't matter because the threads would be based on the title of the product, not who's posting it. So that wouldn't be an issue. They might make a duplicate thread, but that's easy to auto-check and handled by mods or automation.

You can only educate those who care to be educated, unfortunately. Most people who post in the promo threads probably haven't ever glanced the rest of the forum and would have no idea of any rules.

Big this

lots of us who've been on the forums for along time have tried to show new folks "the way" but really it only ever matters to those who actually bother to read and learn so the trying to educate happens way less

for some it takes learning the hard way and seeing folks get annoyed and others just fizzle out when they don't see results and go elsewhere so it's a problem that sort of tends to itself but also operates in an endless cycle

Pretty much, yeah.

I've written software for forum moderation a couple of times, and while it's not perfect, it really does help mods so much. But it's also on the community.

I think if we had title-specific threads, it'd just overall be better. People who enjoy certain titles can follow those threads for news, updates, art, whatever. There wouldn't be seas of posts to scroll through to find an interesting title. There'd be way less spam. And if someone made a duplicate of a title, all you gotta do is flag it for mods to check.

It's really easy and it does work.

It would also encourage people to update daily to get pushed toward the top.

That's what I'd do, yeah. And it'd be really easy to implement programmatically. A web dev could do it in an hour, easily.

i can't speak on the coding but i think it'd depend on whats available to this forums base (which is Discourse iirc) and what options are available in this sites currently implemented version

coz it's definitely old enough that dark more isn't something that can be added in per a response i'd gotten a while back in a thread asking about it so anything beyond that is ???

I've seen a few threads like this, and none of them have made me compelled to click unless I was already keeping up with their work. Considering the imbalance of writers vs. readers here, I feel like this would just clog up the promo thread in a new way. The current system has its fair share of problems, but at least it fosters a situation where creators might be see another work they're interested in (even if it's kind of rare in practice.)

I do like OP's idea, though I'd miss the more unique promotion threads. Maybe having the a few generic promo threads and limiting forum users to only creating more specific threads might work?

Sometimes I wish there was an independent marketplace for web fiction/comics. There are so many sites for web fiction these days that I think everyone has trouble with marketing. At least with an independent site, you could write the code to however you wanted

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.

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!