Feature Request: Sponsored Posts

Digging out this oldie, but still a goldie

We are working on sponsored posts on our forum and currently searching for a more centralized or hollistic set of options or settings to give us control over sponsored posts. I am curious if anyone has been able to

The idea is for sponsored posts to integrate natively into the rest of the forum while giving it a boost. The functionality that comes to mind is partially covered with core and few plugin options. But there are still some features that we don’t know how to implement yet:

  1. search priority by tag: while search priority can be set per category, it would be great to set it per tag as well. It has been discussed before.

  2. create “invisible” sub-category: in order for sponsored posts to integrate naturally into the forum, we don’t want to create a separate sponsored category, while still being able to use per-category features to increase visibility for its topics. Instead our goal is to divide the category into sponsored and non-sponsored to fine-tune visibility settings for each kind of posts, particularly:

  • increase search priority for sponsored topics

  • auto-bump sponsored topics

    our current workaround is to use a “curated” category in which we put highlighted non-sponsored topics and mix them with sponsored posts. That way we boost popular content together with sponsored content.

  1. auto-bump sponsored topics after X days/weeks/months of inactivity