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ImplausiblyJosh
@ImplausiblyJosh

here's a thing I remember, but cannot find any evidence of for some reason? When I was unemployed about 5-10 years ago, I would go onto forums & message boards that you would link your own board onto and agree to make posts on other people's boards. These boards existed to have their own community (hopefully) but also to be a directory and serve as a place to get posts/engagement on your own message board through a post-for-post honor system.

Like, you link your website to this message board. People are interested in making posts on your board, so you make a agreements for 5 posts for 5 posts, you post 5 posts on their board, they post 5 posts on your board. Make an account, post your 5, then report back. Rinse, repeat.

I cannot find evidence of this being a thing for the life of me. I know I did this! I know those types of sites existed, and hopefully still exist. Where are they? Why is evidence of these places hard to find?

If you know what I'm talking about, please help me out. Was there a specific word for this kind of forum? Do you know of any that still exist? I'd love to see what kinds of boards people are making, posting, and promoting in 2023.


ImplausiblyJosh
@ImplausiblyJosh

wanted to update everyone on this: I logged into an old email i do not use anymore and dug around. I found some email notifications for forums like the ones I described. They are all gone, either the sites are just completely gone or they have not been posted in years (since I last posted in them, in one case!).

Wild to see a graveyard for a site type I thought didn't exist.


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in reply to @ImplausiblyJosh's post:

in my memory it was usually not a formal thing, just that it was common to have an "affiliate" subforum you couldn't post in unless you had x number of posts in the rest of the forum

but, I was mostly on the invisionfree side of things, maybe it was more formal over on proboards?

definitely not something i remember; i agree with the other comment that it was mostly just "affiliate" things (mutual agreements between operators). many forums i was around even forbade "join this other board instead" links to external forums

another thing to look at are things like the old "big boards" website, which used to track which message boards were the largest; between those and the old "top 100" sites (remember to vote for us...) you might find something closer to your goal