I’ve noticed these affiliate links for a while now, it’s best if people will now flag these that they do so proactively rather than retroactively otherwise it will be a lot of admin
Perhaps anyone using this method can at least mark those older posts for full disclosure and/or reflect differently on doing so going forward given the mood in the community
Thanks @avantronica & @LyingDalai - it’s definitely not easy to spot all, I appreciate we have raised some more awareness for some time now. 
By the way: It’s always advised to check the links before you click in the interwebz, kids!
it’s almost impossible on mobile though…
Long press should work, I believe.
just opens a preview on iphone, it’s impossible to see the url, and even if it’s one of these url scramblers it will eventually just load the page without showing the full url or the affiliate id part in the query parameters section of the url…
to actually check the url you’d need to copy the url into some text editor like notes and see it, but that’s quite a hassle…
The sort of knock-on effect of that is those “post your music” threads move so quickly that I feel less like posting mine because I can’t put in the energy to drink from that firehose.
I’d be nice if there was a Discourse plugin to filter out affiliate links and affiliate shorteners (used to more blatantly farm clicks.)
I thought about this too but couldn’t find one
Yeah, site hosting-level would be ideal. And I’m definitely not going browser-level with Brave, who “helpfully” replace affiliates with themselves.
Wonder if there’s a Ublock Origin filter that does this, hrm.
wouldn’t work on mobile regardless, and didn’t google killed ublock on chrome?
The fuck is an affiliate link?
Something for wankers.
I thought that’s what this forum was for?
It has to be the right kind of wanking.
when someone is an affiliate to a shop they can include affiliate id in the link so they can get a commission every time someone purchases something using this link, very popular in the synthtuber realm when they review piece of gear and provide an affiliate link so you can “support their effort”
fixed that for you
Oh yeah, think I’ve vaguely heard it mentioned during the old like and subscribe bit of YouTube videos I’ve successfully learned to not hear or see at all.
That’s some lovely playing there @tomcawley - great stuff!
It’s when someone compulsively posts “content” in lieu of any fun or useful contribution to the community so they can seek to get a few bucks from your Amazon or music instrument site order.
It’s “organic” spam, generally low-quality spew, at least in the Youtube description links the affiliate benefit is called out (because I think they have to be 
)
On one hand, most people don’t trim the links they post so affiliate links can get passed on accidentally (i’m sure I’ve been lazy in the past), but people who do it serially and on-the-sly for their personal gain should be banned IMO.
I mean, many of them do go out of their way to create these videos about how hard it is to make these reviews, the lighting and editing etc, so I guess it’s real effort