You’re sick of the rule and so are we!

[Ted S]

Since allowing commercial advertising in our Scuba Board Market Place we have seen a steady rise in the number of views to the forum but a lack of content, posts or replies. To keep ScubaBoard more useful to you, the community member, the diver or the business operator, we have decided to make a very important change. Starting on May 1st every single gear/travel/service/market place post will become free. This means no more worrying about what is commercial and what isn’t, no more paying a fee to get your name out there and best of all, no more monitoring thousands of posts for me!

What does this mean for the user? Instead of only being able to browse a few offers and see only a few paid deals you will now be able to see hundreds of offers and deals from bigger businesses and smaller ones. When a company has an offer for our members you won’t have to wait for them to negotiate with us, the offer will be posted and visible in seconds, just like it is in all of our other forums.

What does this mean for the business? To put it simply it means free advertising! Of course we still have rules for making your posts but aside from these measures meant to stop abuse and spam, you have free reign to promote your latest product, sell off some old inventory, announce a new trip or cruise or just get our your Scuba related message. For those of you who are looking for added exposure and that extra level of traffic we still have a great advertising option for you with sticky posts which are in short supply and high demand so purchase yours today!

Please be sure to view our updated terms of service items located in the FAQ section of ScubaBoard for complete details on our new commercial advertising policies.

Thank you members!

 

[ReefGuy]

Is it possible to block out the marketplace forums?

 

[MechDiver]

How about giving those of us who already see enough advertising to filters those posts from the "New Posts" search?

 

[Doc]

At the same time, I hope you can reserve an area for posts that are truly non-commercial.

I had to jump thru a lot of hoops to post a trip offering that was in no way a commercial profit making offer, and I kind of liked not being associated with profit schemes.

Will there be a forum remaining seperate for that kind of thing?

 

[RICHinNC]

Well....wait a minute....let me check....uhhhhh....yep...I am excited !!! woohoo...
Bring'em on!!!!

 

[Ted S]

RoatanMan,
What we have found out is that it is virtually impossible to tell who is commercial and who is not. Hopefully users posting group trips or other non-commercial messages will explain and title them in a way that states they are private. Perhaps in the future we will be able to expand on the marketplace and better divide message types.

As for filtering, that is a long term goal I would like to see for this software but right now we can not filter search results per forum per user like that.