I'm in the middle of an advertising spree and have noticed that many forums are now listing all ads in alphabetical order instead of by newest first. This makes no sense to me at all and is irritating from a couple different angles.

This is supposedly so people can find a forum that they like more easily. But who goes out there looking for a forum by a specific title? Most times the titles don't give much clue about what the forum is all about anyway. When I'm looking for a new forum, I want to see the most active ads posted and browse them that way. I don't want to sift through a bunch of dead forums that just happen to start with A, B or C.

And then people who post a shiney new ad that has a title toward the end of the alphabet, their ad gets buried at the bottom page of a bunch of possibly long-dead forums.. Who's going to page through old ads and find that specific ad after a few days?

And don't tell me I can simply click the button to change the listed order (which one admin did when I asked in a cbox) I get tired of refreshing the page each time I return to the reordered list. AND most people browsing for ads are not going to bother doing that.

Any comments from admins who sort in alpha order?

[/rant....goes back to advertising]

We do it simply because it's easier for us to see if people have already advertised there. A lot of sites were posting multiple times on our board and it got so tiring to look at an ad and ask, "Isn't this already in here somewhere?"

So that's why we do it. :) Believe me, it's not to frustrate the posters. We also made it a rule that you can't have symbols in your ad title, because it's not fair to bump yourself to the top with `!@%~.

I understand where you're coming from with the whole sifting through dead threads thing, but I find that it really makes no difference whether they were posted a day or a month ago. Sometimes we have ads that have been up three days and then the site's closed, but sites from months ago are still kicking.

That's just my little explanation. But I get where you're coming from, really. Advertising in general is just frustrating. Don't let it get to you too much. :p

Its still annoying for those of us with Websites like:
Total Rp
Herald's Lore
The Battle Grounds(which is always sorted the "the")
The Universe
Verania
Warrior's Mist
Its frustrating to post an ad, and then *poof* its at the bottem. Mine start with odd letters because I try to be creative- while ATTEMPTING to hint at what the site is about.

That can be done by creating a topic with a full alphabetical list of sites for new advertisers and for the staff to see. You'll just update it every time a new ad comes up. Many people have chosen to do this and I always appreciate those ones. Makes my life a lot easier and doesn't harm my possibilities to get my site viewed any more than anywhere else.

I find it rather unfair to list sites in alphabetical order because that way there will be more views on those who have the luck of possessing a name starting with an A. And these will remain in this kind of superior position and only drop if someone has a site name that is before them in the alphabets. That's not variation enough. I think the newest ads just deserve more attention...they are brand new! They need the views.

Buuut that's just my opinion. ^_^

As the admin of 'X-Men: Eclipsing Binary' let me just say "preach it, sister!"

That is sooo annoying. I've tried to solve that problem by making an alphabetical pinned list of all of the site names and then just leave the actual topic list in the usual order of the most recent post first.

I know what you mean though. You could find yourself clicking through a load of links to find one you like but they're all dead. They're just near the top...

Grrr. :(

It's just as easy to enable guest searching in the ad forum as to make everything list alphabetically, and people will use the search if you make it available to them.

'X-Men: Eclipsing Binary'

Ow. I'm sorry.

"Warriors Mist" Is the worst I have.

Hm I think I'm going to have to take the List Idea to heart though. It seems like it will make things MUCH easier.

I totally understand. I hate that. Mostly beacuse they have anoying rules like "NO SYMBOLS," or things like that. The whole point of the Symbols is to attract people to the board. I pretty much stopped making symbols into my topic titles because of this, its annoying.

The most pernicious result of the alphabetical issue, of course, is the punctuation marks in front of ads, so they're bumped to the top. For instance:

``X-Men: Blah Blah Coolness

Or something like that. Makes me crazy.

As a side note, if admins want to check for double-posting, can't they just resort the forum order every now and again and check for it?

Personally, I don't care if people double-post. Not a bit. Why is it so bad?

It encourages people to use extra punctuation, this alpha order does.

X-Men is going straight to the bottom of the list. But what about

__``x-men \\

It'll go to the top of the list. And then the list is really skewed because everyone and their uncle decides to use random punctuation, so your entire list is filled with colons and apostrophes and semicolons--which completely defeats the point of the alpha order.

Exactly. Random punctuation does my head in at the best of times but that is truely annoying and, as December said, completely defeats the point of alphabetising. Really is it that necessary?!

And also I don't see the problem in double posting as long as the original thread is on a different page and you don't just end up with fifteen consecutive posts from '_ ;~What A Great Forum Yo!1!~;_' then I really think it's fine.

Just picky, annoying Admin. >.>

Well, I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one with this pet peeve. I've gotten to the point where I don't even bother posting my ad on a site that does alpha order - feeling that doing so is really a waste of time.

For the few alpha-sorted sites I wanted to post on, I actually switched my topic description for the topic title since it starts with an A. [grumbles]

The simple solution I imposed on all my sites is this:

Your advertisement itself is listed in newest first. Much like RPG-D's index you can bump your thread a month after you posted it.

To eliminate double posting of ads there's a thread (and a link to it on a header to that section) that lists the sites, linked to their ad, alphabetically titled The Advertising Index. So admins can come see if they have already placed their ad and we can check on sites as well. If a site does double post we send them a nice note stating to not do it again, and delete their oldest ad. If they do post again, we delete their listing entirely.

Admins get nice organization, and guest sites get the benefit of not being unfairly treated.

^ Ha! Sneaky but good! ^_^

I don't know why anyone would think that was a good idea. People don't want to click through two different pages to find out whether a forum is inactive or not.

Grr, I didn't realise I was so annoyed about this. :rawr:

And Sadiekins, that the way I would prefer every advertising site to do it. But I guess that won't ever happen. >.>

I've been wondering the same thing ever since this 'no double posting' trend started, actually. I don't understand the admins who forbid people to advertise their board more than once. Isn't more promotion not in their own interest, too? Guess not...

I personally don't care how many times people promote the same forum on my own board, so long as I can do the same on theirs. Advertise away; that's the whole point of it, after all.

As someone with sites named Spirits of the Earth and Remnants of the Earth, this drives me batty. xD

The first few times this happened, I was left baffled because I didn't realize the ads were in alphabetical order, so when I posted I was all, "Wtf?! Did my ad get deleted? Vanish? Ahhh! D8"

But yeah. It's annoying to see my fresh new ad get buried under pages and pages of ads that probably link to old, dead sites. I can't even see the benefit of it from an admin standpoint! When I go to my advertising board so I can start clicking links and advertising, it's beneficial to me for the ads to be listed newest to oldest, so I can advertise on the games I'm certain are still alive, first. Much less work for me; I don't have to go hunting, I know the games at the top are alive and kicking.

I also don't care about double-posting (then again, I use boards2go for my advertisement needs and keep the advertising separate from the forum because I don't want it contributing to the post count and it's ugly and I'm yada...) so people can spam for all I care. P: Honestly, I don't see the need for all the organizing and rules and yadda yadda that so many people place on their advertising boards. I don't organize mine at all and only have one rule--that if you advertise on my board, I get to advertise back.

If you want to check to see if an ad's already been posted, why not use the search feature? Or just keep a list? |:

Admining 101:

For various boards you can set up the forum to choose how it lists, but you can also OPT to sort the topics into a different order.

The advertising forum is not there for an admin to make sure people are playing by the rules. It is to promote other sites. The fairest way to do this is to sort the ads by date, newest first. Then an admin can choose from the drop down search menu to locate repeat offenders or run a basic search on a key word in the post.

Otherwise, you're just screwing everyone else over.