A feature request for Sponsored Posts has been made, where users can pay to show their posts as ads within the community. thegurjyot proposes that sponsored posts be displayed after every 15-20 posts, as well as in the “suggested posts” section, with a clear indication that they are sponsored.
However, Steven believes this feature is better suited for a plugin, citing an existing plugin that allows sponsored topics to be pinned for a few days. Falco shares a link to the plugin, and thegurjyot acknowledges its limitations, emphasizing the need for a more comprehensive solution.
itbhanusharma suggests forking the existing plugin to adapt it to the community’s needs, and thegurjyot agrees that a plugin is the way to go.
jrgong revives the discussion, sharing their experience with sponsored posts on their forum and highlighting the need for more centralized options and settings. They propose several features, including search priority by tag, “invisible” sub-categories, and auto-bumping sponsored topics after a set period of inactivity.
Ads are one way of earning but the communities shine where members can pay to show their posts as ads. Like on FB and Twitter, people can pay to show their posts as ads and this way the layout of the ads still show like the normal posts only.
All that makes the post different from normal posts is a small written message - “sponsored post” or “promoted post”.
In Discourse, the sponsored post can be shown after every 15 or 20 posts and in “suggested posts” after a complete topic. This way even is multiple people pay for sponsoring their posts then, also the list won’t be completely filled with them. But the user should also have the option to set the ad for a number of days and will also need some statistics to show to them. Although, I think a more solid plan can be curated by more experienced people in this community.
What do you guys think about this feature request?
Are you talking about the category? Because this is the first time I asked about a feature and I didn’t know which category to use.
@Falco thank you for the link. This plugin’s idea is good but this only pins the post to the top. Although, the idea is to show the post at multiple places rather than just at the top. Means, when a person is scrolling a list of posts then after every 15 or 20 posts he should see a “sponsored post”. That way even if multiple people pay for such ads then also the top of the list won’t be filled with just sponsored posts.
Yeah I know that this idea is for a plugin only and not for Discourse core. Would like to see if someone can make a full fledged users ads system. Although, there’s no hurry for this, I was just putting forward an idea.
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:
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.
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.
auto-bump sponsored topics after X days/weeks/months of inactivity
