/R/Churning Kills Referral Threads & Our Policy Going Forward

A lot of readers of this site will be active on reddit’s /r/churning subreddit. Earlier today they announced that they would be:

effective immediately, the mods are going to be indefinitely retiring the referral threads. All the mods have full time jobs and can not devote more energy to this issue. We may look at figuring out the issue with RLB while the threads are down, but that is only a possibility, and a small one at that.

I can definitely emphasis with the mod team. Dealing with referral links is a constant pain, people are constantly trying to skirt the rules and abuse the system. Keeping things fair is extremely difficult and people seem incapable of following even the most basic rules. The upside for us is that at least we’ve got money coming in from advertisements, whereas the mod team are all volunteers.

Our New Policy

One of the things we want to do on this site is foster a community of readers helping each other as it’s simply not possible for us to answer every single reader question or find every deal. We rely on the contributions of readers heavily and one nice way to give back is by allowing referral threads. That being said moderating/dealing with referral threads has gotten significantly harder as this site grows. We’ve been experimenting with something recently and it’s worked well enough that we will be using it going forward.

• When appropriate we will post a referral link post. This will usually be done when there is a reason, for example a sign up bonus increasing.
• The referral link post will be open for 24-48 hours for comments. This should allow most active readers to post their links, most of the spam and abuse seems to happen much later than this.
• Readers will be allowed to post one link. No posting multiple links, no using different identities. The full link must be posted rather than a shortened link.
• After the comments are closed, we will moderate all the comments. We will remove any duplicates/people skirting the rules.

How You Can Help

• Be mindful of the referral links you use. You can now see a readers comment history by clicking the ‘i’ icon next to their name. Before using somebodies link make sure you have a look at their comment history and see if they post useful information. If you see somebody post a useful comment, write down that name and search for them next time you want to use a referral link. This is the single most important thing you can do.
• If you see something, say something. Did you notice somebody not following the rules? Posting multiple links? Let us know so we can fix it. Snitching is ok sometimes.
• Follow the rules. I can’t count the number of times people just don’t follow simple rules. It doesn’t take long to read the referral posts, the rules are subject to change so give it a quick read before posting your links.