Originally posted by SkepticOverlord
While we certainly want to encourage and promote the online efforts of our members, there are some restrictions we need to ask everyone to follow.

First and foremost, do not create a post promoting your website, as our terms & conditions require you to ask permission first. Generally, it's "poor board manners" for a new member to immediately promote their website in your first introduction post. Simply tell us your interests and how you came to ATS.

After time, and we all get to know you, we certainly want to know what your involved with, and perhaps even get an official link exchange going in our Conspiracy Links domain.

If you have something important to promote, and have been a contributing member of the community, we can discuss ways to help you. We may allow you to author a story for our main website that references your work, or utilize an exclusive ATSNN story on what you and your site are up to.


Because of our size and popularity, we need to be careful about sites we link to, and how the linking is allowed. Sites like us regularly get purveyors of porn or scams registering in the hopes of getting the link in their profile indexed by Google (only members see profiles, so they're immediately cut-off from Google). Here are some of the general things we consider:

1- Google includes sites we link to in their overall calculations of relevancy.

2- A few automated site filtering systems also use the sites for which we have outbound links in the calculations of our 'score'. If we have too many links to sites they rank low, we will also be ranked low, thereby potentially causing ATS to be automatically filtered by schools, libraries, and corporate networks.

3- And we need to mange the general perception that we stay on top of what's happening in our forums. If we allow any link to be posted, no matter by whom or to what, ATS may appear to be a "free for all". Our growth and credibility relies on just the opposite, we are far from a free for all.


So thanks, in advance, for helping with these seemingly trivial, but important in the long-run, issues for ATS.