Uh oh. I just posted a link to what I thought was very useful information for beginner golfers and it was removed? Why? Is there a rule about outside links or are you just trying to make it harder for newbies to get into the game? Can I even mention the link so an admin knows what I’m talking about? Am I in China or Australia?

The post was in the iseekgolf golf days forum, in thread Brisbane Golfers?

I had this happen the other day and then realise I hadn’t clicked on the link button on the right, just about here…......when you type…....

b1_ – that golf site has been spamming our site now for about 6 months trying to get free publicity so we are well and truly sick of them.

We do not remove links for the fun of it – they will get removed for a reason and that is the reason.

I can understand you don’t want commercial interests spamming the forums, I wouldn’t either, it’s just that that site is one of only a few organisations registered to provide handicaps in Queensland to social golfers (ie beginners) by the Australian Golf Union. It took me ages to find them and no wonder.

Were you spammed by one person or many, because of course beginners will talk them up and try and tell others because there’s very few other options to get a handicap outside paying crap loads of money for a club membership.

If you can’t make exceptions fair enough, but you really should look at leaving some indication that a post has been edited. Wiping clean parts of a post like it never existed does not indicate to me that you take editing seriously.

b1 – We get probably 40 spammers a day that we have to delete their posts. Most you don’t see and some you do.

We do not have the resources to explain what we have done and why. You could be the owner of that company for all we know and there’s no way we are spending time explaining to you why we have deleted the spam when you know full well what you are doing.

Unfortunately after 7 years of running a forum, we find most people who post links have a reason to do so – eg they are the owner or know the owner.

I’d suggest it took you ages to find their site because a) the company has no idea how to market themselves and b) they don’t want to spend a cent doing it, which is why we got spammed by them. We’ve seen a million of these little ideas come and go and the above two reasons sum up most of them.

Fair point about the edit notice but it’s not high on the list at the moment as we very rarely have to edit posts beyond the spammers which are a total deletion of threads generally.

More than likely your link would have stayed if it weren’t for the above reason.

Thanks for the feedback.

Forget the site link you removed, wiping peoples words away is way more than a fair point. How hard is it leave a ‘this post was edited by an admin’ sentence in your clipboard for a quick ctrl-V paste. What you left in my post has only half its meaning left after the removal of the other paragraph, not to mention the other question I had in the removed paragraph that had nothing to do with the site.

I respect your right to edit whatever you want from your own site but take some care. When you’re trying to communicate something, no matter how prosaic the subject, if half of it gets removed and what your trying to say gets warped as a consequence it doesn’t leave a good feeling.

I visited that site, sent them an email and it bounced, so I sent another email and it bounced so I found another email on their site and they haven’t bothered to reply….

They’ve answered all my emails. And yes that email is no good because it bounced on me too. I’ve received all instructions for Sunday and they say they will welcome late entries because of cancellations so all I can think of is that you try again.