It depends on how complicated or simple they programmed their forums.
You know how it is, some people make a complex system making even the most simple modification take hours just because they didn't think ahead.
Assuming their forum system is simple, it will still take time for tapas to aprove the changes but we can propose it for now.
If they reject it, at least we tried.
Ah for real? I figured they used some combo of sql and php. That's usually what I work with if I'm doing web stuff (and javascript of course). You could do a check during the php processing of data to see if a title exists in the db already and then return false to the poster (denied post) if it did.
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?
i only ever found out about it after doing some digging and checking the automated responses (the close after 30 days thing) and managed to backtrack that to the site host but beyond that uh...no clue ^^;;
i'm definitely not a coding person (most i've got under my belt is basic html and dreamweaver) so i leave that talk to the tech heads 
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
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.
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. 
You're not the first person to say it, you won't be the last. We've talked about soluation here before, like only being able to post in promotions a certain number of times a day, or having strict only promo in these selected threads, but nothing works. Even having strict threads and please only post to these threads worked. The strict rules on milestone promos aren't enforced anymore. No one has any interest in getting hold of the promo section, but at least we can mute it these days. Even though it's just the same 20 people advertising to the same 20 people and promo threads barely work these days. Promos have just gone up and up. You can't stop it these days because no one cares about the forums enough to think about how that spamming looks to outsiders.
I'm more on the side of limiting the number of posts a user can make in the promotion cathegory. Personaly I like the promo threads that have a theme as my interests can be pretty nische, and those topics aren't really limitable. Or the fun ones, like "promote with an out of context page or sentence", "promote with a meme" etc. ^^
I don't want to punish creative promotion threads just because the others are getting out of hand.
