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  1. BoldMan
    FAIL

    Insurance article

    Well looks like th egemlins have struck out at the platent advertorial that was the Indemnity Insurance article... clicking on the "8 COmments" button, ended up with this:

    Gone

    The requested resource

    /forum/1/2016/04/14/professiona_indemnity_insurance_promo/

    is no longer available on this server and there is no forwarding address. Please remove all references to this resource.

    Apache/2.4.10 (Debian) Server at forums.theregister.co.uk Port 80

    OOO did someone object to the almost certainly critical comments and crudely delete the thread?

    1 0 Reply
    1. Dr Spork
      Reply Icon
      Alien

      Re: Insurance article

      Interesting.

      The infomercial itself is still there ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/14/professiona_indemnity_insurance_promo/ )

      I wonder if this is going to be the format of future Lumia/Surface "reviews"

      The "crude deletion" angle is odd. There are often articles without comments... and they don't have the button... so why leave it there?

      1 0 Reply
      1. TeeCee Gold badge
        Reply Icon
        Coat

        Re: Insurance article

        Hmm, missed that the first time round. If I'm reading that right, the idea is to insure against being sued into bankruptcy 'cos your advice was shit?

        If that's actually a legal possibility, how come the likes of McKinsey and Accenture are still in business? Their PI premiums must be astronomical.

        1 0 Reply
        1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
          Reply Icon

          Re: Insurance article

          " ... how come the likes of McKinsey and Accenture are still in business ... "

          Because they are very, very good at drawing up contracts and even better at putting escape clauses in their recommendations. In the end it boils down to the client having done something wrong if the plan didn't work.

          1 0 Reply
      2. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Re: Insurance article

        As the page says, it's a promo - a promotion. Comments were turned off because it's not an article, it's an ad. We do promos from time to time; they pay the bills and they are labeled as such (and also rather stick out - they're not written by Register journalists).

        Don't confuse promos with editorial articles. Our reviews are never promos. Promos are usually special offers of competitions or the like.

        C.

        1 0 Reply
        1. Vimes
          Reply Icon

          Re: Insurance article @diodesign

          Comments were turned off because it's not an article, it's an ad.

          You don't think that disguising an ad as an article is more than a little deceptive?

          and also rather stick out - they're not written by Register journalists

          Which only means anything to the staff on your end. Most users I suspect would not be able to separate one of your writers for anybody else, a situation not helped by your inclusion of articles from other places like out-law.com.

          The author's name often doesn't make it stick out at all.

          I'd also note that a quick search for 'promo' on this site seems to return a large number of results, the majority of which seem to have 'Team Register' as the author...

          2 0 Reply
          1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
            Reply Icon

            Re: Insurance article @diodesign

            "The author's name often doesn't make it stick out at all."

            True. Maybe they could add an indicator after the name in the byline like "staff writer" or "guest writer" or paid shill "sales representative" or something.

            As we are on the subject of El Reg writers, why does Darren Pauli's avatar look so sad? It always makes me want to give him a hug.

            3 0 Reply
            1. Vimes
              Reply Icon

              Re: Insurance article @diodesign

              Maybe they could add an indicator after the name in the byline like "staff writer" or "guest writer" or paid shill "sales representative" or something.

              An interesting idea, but whilst I can't speak for others all I can say is that when I'm scanning through the headlines I rarely read more than the headline itself before choosing to click on the link or not, and rarely notice whether it's labelled as a promo or anything else. I wonder how many others would do the same?

              Trying to insert adverts into the area normally taken up by headlines is one thing. Doing that *and* making them look like one of the articles with only one minor difference missed by many is a fundamentally dishonest way of interacting with users IMO.

              I wonder if ad blockers pick up these fake articles?

              2 0 Reply
              1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
                Reply Icon

                Re: Insurance article @diodesign

                I wonder if ad blockers pick up these fake articles?

                Apparently not. At the moment I'm using Brave as a webbrowser. Beta, but reasonable. Also really fast and has the ad-blocking and not-tracking already built in. So I don't see any banners or singing, dancing, barfing pop-ups or whatever.

                I can see however ervything that is formatted as an article headline.

                1 0 Reply
          2. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge
            Reply Icon

            Re: Re: Insurance article @diodesign

            "You don't think that disguising an ad as an article is more than a little deceptive?"

            The idea is absolutely not to deceive. I don't wake up in the morning wanting to deceive people. I'm sorry you think it's disguised - I'm meeting our sales team in next month in London, I'll bring up your concerns there.

            C.

            2 0 Reply
            1. Vimes
              Reply Icon

              Re: Insurance article @diodesign

              I don't wake up in the morning wanting to deceive people.

              It wasn't my intention to suggest that you did - apologies if my previous comments gave that impression by the way - however the end result regardless of whether it was intended or not is effectively to deceive people IMO.

              I'm assuming you honestly believe that the current status quo is acceptable. Sometimes however the reality of how people use your site won't tally with your own assumptions & perceptions.

              For what little it's worth that's what I thought had happened here and I was just trying to highlight it (you mentioned the 'PROMO' sub heading for example, but a lot of the time this goes by unnoticed which would seem to be one such mismatch).

              There is another possibility too: I've been involved in web projects before where perfectly good websites were mangled beyond recognition by sales people with their own priorities (the Simpsons 'dancing Jesus' website has nothing on what they somehow managed to come up with). For all I know something similar could have happened with this site: somebody in your sales department had been given too much influence and decided that this method of advertising was a good idea.

              1 0 Reply
      3. Marco Fontani
        Reply Icon

        Re: Insurance article

        The "crude deletion" angle is odd. There are often articles without comments... and they don't have the button... so why leave it there?

        If the article went live with comments disabled everything would've worked as you expected. Instead, they were mistakenly enabled at publish time.

        An odd bug of the commenting system, coupled with the fact that it doesn't happen often that comments need to be disabled and purged after an article has been made live... means the article's stuck in that situation: the forum is 410 GONE as it should, but the button still links there and some comments may be able to be found via search or other means.

        2 0 Reply
        1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
          Reply Icon
          Coat

          Re: Insurance article

          Just spinkle liberal amounts of DevOps on the code then and everything will be fine. I think I have a manual on it in my pocket.

          2 0 Reply
    2. Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
      Reply Icon

      Re: Insurance article

      Comments are intact. But not easy to find.

      I do recall that thread as an intelligent discussion. 2 comments can be seen here:

      m.forums.theregister.co.uk/user/47702/

      0 0 Reply

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