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This Windy City News guy is posting anything but. His links appear to all lead to press releases. I'm cool with the occasional post like that, but this person joined today and has posted more than a dozen already.
Ask WC: What do we do about spammers posting tons of press releases and lame stories?
node/19416 - 2 weeks ago - 276 views
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I noticed that too. I wonder if winning that grant yesterday raised our profile a little bit.
Just don't read his stuff, I guess. I post a lot of my own stories on here and when no one is interested the post disappears.
It's not the first time I've seen people pop in on a 1-2 time visit just to try to get some added traffic. A lot of times people take these cheesy pr seminars and are given basically a lot of cheesy tactical ideas to plaster press releases that they write anywhere online, so I'm sure with a higher profile there will be more of this than less.
As for "lame" stories, they may be lame for some but important to others; obviously they are usually important enough to the person who posted them unless they're just trying to build up their clout.
Obviously we're new to this forum; thank you for taking the time to read and comment on our submitted news content.
I'm sorry to hear you see our news content as "spam," but I respectfully disagree with this claim:
We've submitted a lot of original, local news content -- which it seems that this site requests.
I thought that submitting our Chicago-centric, local news and event information might be a valuable addition to the other news content on this site.
I assure you that our content is thoughtfully prepared by a professional writing staff and certainly not an attempt to implement some "cheesy" PR tactic.
We are also an (developing) online news agency; the majority of our content promotes events from local theaters, city agencies and nonprofit groups located throughout the city of Chicago.
At this time I am not sure if we will continue to submit our content, it seems I may have misunderstood the purpose of this site.
Thanks again for your feedback.
James, Chicago Press Release Services
Hey, James, welcome to the Citizen.
You guys are welcome to post anything you like here. Just take note of the published rules of the road:
Over on the submission page, there's a line about posting your own stuff:
Earlier today, you guys posted about 10 articles, each 2 minutes apart. I think that's fair to describe as "going nuts." It's hard to believe you'd have 10 press releases that are all truly awesome. 2-3? Definitely possible. Hang around here a bit to get a feel for what WCers like to read. Then post stories that you think will do well.
We send thousands of local readers out to sites like yours everyday. Would love to send people to the best of your stories. Do share them, just make sure to get a sense for how things work. When the latest 10 stories are all from the same user, it makes people grumpy on here as I'm sure you can imagine.
I agree that an occasional press release is OK, but isn't there something in the submission guidelines that says not to submit so much stuff at once that you dominate the "Latest" page?
You got it, thanks for letting us know.
Time for some "executive action" fellow Windy Citizens?
I tend to think that content control of the WC by its readers isn't really necessary. If something is good, it will float to the top. If not, it will be buried by new stuff. Is it possible to down vote something into the negatives?
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