It would be useful if ET would strengthen the Terms of Use/Service. There are gaping loopholes. The following behaviors are all highly correlated to commercial websites:
1) Sell service/product directly
2) carry advertisements/Adwords to make revenue from OTHER sites
2) gain traffic to website [especially, repeat traffic]
3) harvest emails/personal info to resell or for marketing purposes
4) promote/advertise/market website [especially free redirects from other blogs, forums, websites, etc.]
5) Uplift site owner/blogger as some kind of expert in field. This is the main purpose of blogs, and enable them to eventually be monetized.
But since the TOU/TOS are vague and do not address these directly, there are constantly a stream of people who push this and try to gain some of these advantages, and ET is often very slow to respond, allowing some threads to exist for many months and build up the site's traffic
For example, this person and his "blog":
http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=195415
-Starts off in the OP with his personal site (that is not the official definition of a blog - which are usually in something like blogger)
- Requiring registration (including email) to participate. This is a standard trick to build email lists, which are quite valuable wen targeted, such as "traders."
In addition,
-- The purpose of ET journals IS to be a blog.
-- There is rarely a time when the content on a "blog" could not be listed on ET sites. It is hard to justify why people need to redirect off of ET into their personal sites, and especially seeking to perform any of 1) to 5) above.
I suggested some wording changes to the "commercial site" part of the TOU/TOS that addressed this (a couple of months ago), but that was glossed over. It has a lot to do with whether ET is a serious commercial enterprise, or sort of an informal forum that does not take spammers seriously, to the detriment of posters, readers, sponsors, and its overall reputation.
1) Sell service/product directly
2) carry advertisements/Adwords to make revenue from OTHER sites
2) gain traffic to website [especially, repeat traffic]
3) harvest emails/personal info to resell or for marketing purposes
4) promote/advertise/market website [especially free redirects from other blogs, forums, websites, etc.]
5) Uplift site owner/blogger as some kind of expert in field. This is the main purpose of blogs, and enable them to eventually be monetized.
But since the TOU/TOS are vague and do not address these directly, there are constantly a stream of people who push this and try to gain some of these advantages, and ET is often very slow to respond, allowing some threads to exist for many months and build up the site's traffic
For example, this person and his "blog":
http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=195415
-Starts off in the OP with his personal site (that is not the official definition of a blog - which are usually in something like blogger)
- Requiring registration (including email) to participate. This is a standard trick to build email lists, which are quite valuable wen targeted, such as "traders."
In addition,
-- The purpose of ET journals IS to be a blog.
-- There is rarely a time when the content on a "blog" could not be listed on ET sites. It is hard to justify why people need to redirect off of ET into their personal sites, and especially seeking to perform any of 1) to 5) above.
I suggested some wording changes to the "commercial site" part of the TOU/TOS that addressed this (a couple of months ago), but that was glossed over. It has a lot to do with whether ET is a serious commercial enterprise, or sort of an informal forum that does not take spammers seriously, to the detriment of posters, readers, sponsors, and its overall reputation.
