Morrus said:
But, to use a lot of other peoples' arguments here -- the purpose of this site is not to generate sales for publishers; it never has been - it is to provide information to people. A link to your site achieves that aim perfectly. Any sales generated are a side effect (albeit a welcome one to the publisher). And that system works just fine for the print publishers out there.
However, those links HAVE been allowed. For years now, actually. This has indeed changed customer perception of what this particular forum is, along with changing practical application. This is where what I mentioned will result in problems: a customer won't understand why those links are gone all of a sudden. In fact, they won't really care what EnWorld's reasons are. All they'll care about is there is now an additional step (if not an outright obstacle) to them purchasing something they see and like in a press release. This has nothing to do with how informative a company's web site is but rather the proven fact that sales go down the more clicks a person has to take to finalize a sale.
Now, sales may not be what this forum was initially inteded for but you DID allow that to occur, and in fact did accomodate it by making rules governing such behaviors--officially sanctioning this area to that purpose. This policy is stepping entirely back from that and will result in a reduction in this fora's perceived functionality--I wouldn't be surprised if more publishers stop spending so much time here because a large amount of their incentive to do so is being removed.
As for the print publisher's perspective, you may want to consider that they also have an entirely different foundation to work with that provides the majority of their income. That's different when you begin to talk about PDF publishers who, by necessity, utilize related Internet sites to drum up business and don't have their product on shelves where clients can pick it up and then go buy it. Customers will indeed wonder why an Internet-based company isn't posting links to its products on an Internet site where it's posting press releases--it's an inevitable result of this policy.
A compromise may be to consider something like "vendor accounts": something like membership accounts that allow publishers to post links. If you consider all such links to be advertising and are willing to sell advertising on your front page, why not create such an option to do likewise within the fora as well?
I've also been of the opinion for a long time now that this site has become too reliant on just receiving press releases and announcing products ad infinitum - sometimes it seems to be more of a giant catalogue than anything else.
This is because, for most companies, product press releases comprises the majority of their news. If all that was being posted was non-product related news, the publisher's forum would be very slow indeed.
