I believe the answer is no.
When I click the "new posts" link for example, I get a page with all the new posts on the site, including posts inside vendor forums.
But, the sponsor forums are not much more than advertising being that you cannot have an unchecked discussion about the product. And that's fine - these sponsors pay to have a forum & advertise here, so I get that they are granted some leeway and don't want the forum they paid for full of criticism, some of which may be false.
But, to group them in with the regular forums in the search results is not much different than say Ford paying for a positive story about their cars to appear on the news without telling the viewers the segment is actually a paid advertisement.
Perhaps sponsor run forums could be designated with some kind of graphic or different color thread titles so that they stand out in general search results.
Something to let people know, that unlike the rest of the site, which has by far the best collection of cannabis growing info on the net thanks to the non-commercial and thus trustworthy contributions, that the content in the vendor forums cannot be trusted to the same degree.
To put it another way - grouping in "sponsor censored" and "pay-to-play" forums with the rest of the site is reducing the overall quality level & trustworthiness of icmag, in my opinion at least.
Imagine if a few more hardware vendors hop on board. Half the "New Posts" results could end up being in these sponsor forums, which would, to me, destroy the credibility of the site. We can't be considerd a trustworthy source of information when users have to do serious "weeding" (pun intended hehe) of search results before looking at a given thread that catches their eye.
And for those members who don't notice or know what forums are sponsored, well, they are walking into a trap that the vendor has set for them given that they control the conversation in their forum.
So yeah, to the admin of the site - can *something* be added to designate forums that are vendor controlled, like a little graphic or something along those lines? I think this quick move wouldn't take anything away from the vendors, and would do a lot to seperate these watered down forums from the real info that icmag is known and respected for.
When I click the "new posts" link for example, I get a page with all the new posts on the site, including posts inside vendor forums.
But, the sponsor forums are not much more than advertising being that you cannot have an unchecked discussion about the product. And that's fine - these sponsors pay to have a forum & advertise here, so I get that they are granted some leeway and don't want the forum they paid for full of criticism, some of which may be false.
But, to group them in with the regular forums in the search results is not much different than say Ford paying for a positive story about their cars to appear on the news without telling the viewers the segment is actually a paid advertisement.
Perhaps sponsor run forums could be designated with some kind of graphic or different color thread titles so that they stand out in general search results.
Something to let people know, that unlike the rest of the site, which has by far the best collection of cannabis growing info on the net thanks to the non-commercial and thus trustworthy contributions, that the content in the vendor forums cannot be trusted to the same degree.
To put it another way - grouping in "sponsor censored" and "pay-to-play" forums with the rest of the site is reducing the overall quality level & trustworthiness of icmag, in my opinion at least.
Imagine if a few more hardware vendors hop on board. Half the "New Posts" results could end up being in these sponsor forums, which would, to me, destroy the credibility of the site. We can't be considerd a trustworthy source of information when users have to do serious "weeding" (pun intended hehe) of search results before looking at a given thread that catches their eye.
And for those members who don't notice or know what forums are sponsored, well, they are walking into a trap that the vendor has set for them given that they control the conversation in their forum.
So yeah, to the admin of the site - can *something* be added to designate forums that are vendor controlled, like a little graphic or something along those lines? I think this quick move wouldn't take anything away from the vendors, and would do a lot to seperate these watered down forums from the real info that icmag is known and respected for.
