Readers will often ask why a specific referral thread is closed and if we can reopen it so they can share their referral. The reason we allow referrals is to reward regular readers that provide helpful comments (this is why you should always take the time to find a link from a reader that provides helpful information).
As time goes on the amount of regular readers sharing their links dramatically decreases and people breaking the rules dramatically increases. This means we spend more time moderating these threads and less regular readers are sharing their links. To combat that we normally close comments after a period of 24-48 hours as that allows the highest amount of useful contributors to share their links and lowest amount of moderation time.
If every referral thread was left open one of two things would happen:
- Threads would become overrun with rule breakers, meaning useful contributors wouldn’t get any referrals defeating the purpose of allowing them in the first place
- I would spend every waking moment of my life moderating referral threads
Hopefully the introduction of user accounts and requiring these for referral threads will allow us to keep them open for longer, but we will still be closing them after a period of time.
As a reminder a lot of regular contributors have links in their username that you can click so if you don’t see a link from somebody that you think provides value and you’re searching for a referral you can always click their name and hopefully find it.
