Kylotan Posted October 24, 2022 Share Posted October 24, 2022 On 10/23/2022 at 10:43 AM, Music Software Deals said: We've updated the website design with a new look and some new features: It looks like you took away the ability to sort by the price reduction percentage. Can you bring that back? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Music Software Deals Posted October 24, 2022 Share Posted October 24, 2022 31 minutes ago, Kylotan said: It looks like you took away the ability to sort by the price reduction percentage. Can you bring that back? Yep it was overwritten by accident with the new price design - we'll re-add it back 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Music Software Deals Posted October 25, 2022 Share Posted October 25, 2022 Quick update: (Re) Added the "Show Expired Deals" selection box so you can only show products on sale or show all products Added sorting by "Discount" - highest to lowest / lowest to highest Added sorting for "Newest deals to oldest deals" and "Oldest Deals to Newest Deals" Added "Random" sorting which is the default Improved mobile responsiveness Click product image tile will bring you to the price history page More updates coming soon thanks 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mibby Posted October 25, 2022 Share Posted October 25, 2022 I would rather see "Manufacturer" as the default filter next to Product Name. If that were the case, I'd rarely (if ever) have to even open the "More options" search section. I'm more interested in a deal on a plugin/dev than the specific Store I buy it from. Plus, when I pick a plugin, you show me all the stores where it's sold so I can choose the store then. 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
locrian Posted October 25, 2022 Share Posted October 25, 2022 @Music Software Deals ... Thank you for creating such a useful website! Have you thought about adding something akin to a suitability analysis? People use this technique to identify the optimal place to live by 'stacking' (adding) features in spatially-registered maps. For example, you would: 1) obtain maps containing numerical values for things like school district rating, mean temperature, air quality, crime-rate, etc.; 2) add the values at each location across maps; and 3) sort the aggreate values in descending order to get a list of locations with the highest overall scores. You could weight each category equally or weight some higher than others. Since some of the examples above would not be desireable, like crime, you'd encode those values as: value = 1-crime-rate (such that low crime rates would score close to 1 and high rates close to 0). For plugins you'd give us the ability to add together different factors (possibly with different weights and different signs [+/-]) so that we could zero in on just the few plugins we're really likely to buy. For example, we could look at the combination of discount (encoded as: value = discount/100), price (encoded as: value = plugin_price/max_price ...or... value = plugin_price/mean_price), and offer-recency (encoded as: value = 1 - num_of_days_on_sale). The reason I'm suggesting this is that -- although your website is very useful -- it still involves a lot of scrolling through stuff that we're not really interested in. A suitability analysis feature would enable us to find what we're looking for very quickly. Cheers... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reid Rosefelt Posted October 25, 2022 Author Share Posted October 25, 2022 Just so you all know, @Music Software Deals has been restricted from posting on this forum indefinitely. There is apparently a forum rule against publicizing your own website. I wonder why only he is penalized while companies like @VSTBuzz have been doing this for years. This is a "deals" forum and IMHO anything that helps the members get the best deals is very germane to what this forum is all about. What exactly happens here besides sending people to other websites? Everything from stores like Plugin Boutique and Audio Deluxe to small developers to helpful sites and YouTube channels like Sample Library Review. And isn't it a real benefit for people on this forum to be able to provide suggestions for features on Music Software Deals? 5 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
locrian Posted October 25, 2022 Share Posted October 25, 2022 9 minutes ago, Reid Rosefelt said: Just so you all know, @Music Software Deals has been restricted from posting on this forum indefinitely. There is apparently a forum rule against publicizing your own website. I wonder why only he is penalized while companies like @VSTBuzz have been doing this for years. This is a "deals" forum and IMHO anything that helps the members get the best deals is very germane to what this forum is all about. What exactly happens here besides sending people to other websites? Everything from stores like Plugin Boutique and Audio Deluxe to small developers to helpful sites and YouTube channels like Sample Library Review. And isn't it a real benefit for people on this forum to be able to provide suggestions for features on Music Software Deals? Did this just happen (in the last few hours)? The reason I'm asking is b/c I'm seeing a post from MSD from just 8 hours ago? What am I missing? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bluzdog Posted October 25, 2022 Share Posted October 25, 2022 10 minutes ago, Reid Rosefelt said: Just so you all know, @Music Software Deals has been restricted from posting on this forum indefinitely. Hmmm... seems like there's an easy work around. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PavlovsCat Posted October 25, 2022 Share Posted October 25, 2022 (edited) 43 minutes ago, Reid Rosefelt said: Just so you all know, @Music Software Deals has been restricted from posting on this forum indefinitely. There is apparently a forum rule against publicizing your own website. I wonder why only he is penalized while companies like @VSTBuzz have been doing this for years. This is a "deals" forum and IMHO anything that helps the members get the best deals is very germane to what this forum is all about. What exactly happens here besides sending people to other websites? Everything from stores like Plugin Boutique and Audio Deluxe to small developers to helpful sites and YouTube channels like Sample Library Review. And isn't it a real benefit for people on this forum to be able to provide suggestions for features on Music Software Deals? That would be a strange rule, as you've mentioned, every developer that posts here is sending people to their site or a reseller site. The moderators here have historically been very liberal -- you've created threads about your YouTube channel and they haven't shut it down. A number of people made posts about missing Larry and most of us posted in it and until someone started trouble, those stayed up. Did you get this info from the guy who owns the site or directly from a moderator? I could understand if the mods are concerned about blatant repeated self promotion cluttering the forum, but I don’t think the MusicSoftwareDeals guy was anywhere close to doing that. He was always reasonable, straight forward and friendly. Edited October 25, 2022 by PavlovsCat 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PavlovsCat Posted October 25, 2022 Share Posted October 25, 2022 (edited) Double post. Edited October 25, 2022 by PavlovsCat Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mibby Posted October 25, 2022 Share Posted October 25, 2022 1 hour ago, Reid Rosefelt said: Just so you all know, @Music Software Deals has been restricted from posting on this forum indefinitely. There is apparently a forum rule against publicizing your own website. I wonder why only he is penalized while companies like @VSTBuzz have been doing this for years. This is a "deals" forum and IMHO anything that helps the members get the best deals is very germane to what this forum is all about. What exactly happens here besides sending people to other websites? Everything from stores like Plugin Boutique and Audio Deluxe to small developers to helpful sites and YouTube channels like Sample Library Review. And isn't it a real benefit for people on this forum to be able to provide suggestions for features on Music Software Deals? 100% agree! @Music Software Deals is offering a DEALS service and fits right in here and he hasn't been obnoxious or anything about it either. Hopefully the mods will reconsider. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
antler Posted October 25, 2022 Share Posted October 25, 2022 2 hours ago, PavlovsCat said: That would be a strange rule, as you've mentioned, every developer that posts here is sending people to their site or a reseller site Just guessing, but could it be that MSD was using feedback from this forum to actively build a middleman website that makes profit from affiliate links from multiple resellers? That would make it different from e.g. Plugin Boutique, who you buy from and create a user account with, etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PavlovsCat Posted October 25, 2022 Share Posted October 25, 2022 (edited) 6 hours ago, antler said: Just guessing, but could it be that MSD was using feedback from this forum to actively build a middleman website that makes profit from affiliate links from multiple resellers? That would make it different from e.g. Plugin Boutique, who you buy from and create a user account with, etc. There's nothing secret that his site's links are affiliate marketing links. His whole motivation to build the site is to profit when people click the affiliate links to make a purchase. Legally, the site is supposed to state that, but a lot don't. But that's a whole different story. The site has real value, IMO. I think it's worthwhile (they just need to add a disclosure statement about affiliate links). Consider that every YouTube influencer giving "reviews " of sample libraries that posts links to their videos in this forum is an affiliate marketer for the products they "review" (hence why these folks aren't reviewers in the true, unbiased, journalistic sense, but are actually salespeople pretending to be unbiased reviewers, profiting from sales for products they're actually promoting with their "reviews," in fact putting product in influencers hands -- and giving the most popular ones financial incentives $$$$$$-- is part of every major brand's promotional strategy plans these days). These folks are using their reviews as vehicles for them to make affiliate marketing money and ad revenue from YouTube, and they still continue to post here. Consequently, I don't think it would be consistent to single out the MusicSoftwareDeals guy when the other affiliate marketers are posting their "reviews" here. Edited October 26, 2022 by PavlovsCat 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mibby Posted October 26, 2022 Share Posted October 26, 2022 Please @Wookiee (or whomever) - just asking if you might reconsider the ban on MusicSoftwareDeals? Did he even get a warning or anything? I don't see how he's done anything more than other store related posters. He's been providing an excellent service for us (they ALL are) and in a friendly manner and has always been up front with the affiliate link thing. I mean, he's practically building our own custom deals searching website. It would be a shame to lose that input here. Pretty please?? 🙂 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reid Rosefelt Posted October 26, 2022 Author Share Posted October 26, 2022 22 hours ago, locrian said: Did this just happen (in the last few hours)? The reason I'm asking is b/c I'm seeing a post from MSD from just 8 hours ago? What am I missing? He emailed me and asked me to let you all know. So yeah, maybe it happened shortly before my post. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reid Rosefelt Posted October 26, 2022 Author Share Posted October 26, 2022 I used to do a November deals post on VI:Control. It had a lot of affiliate links. For the most part, people refused to click on them. But they did find the information useful. So you don't have to click on the links if you don't want to. I'm the only one here who knows how hard @cclarry works. I used to get up at 5 am every day and work until dinner time. Check in later too. It took over my life during November. Larry does this all year round solely because he cares about the people on this forum. So if you are offended by the months of work that @Music Software Deals has put into this--don't go there, or don't click. But if you do use it, I hope that he sets up some kind of way to buy him a coffee. I added Kofi and was surprised by how generous some people were . This won't complete with what Larry does for all of us (anymore than my post did), but it will be a nice supplement. So please @Wookiee reconsider. The forum is for us and we want to hear from him. We should have some say in that. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
locrian Posted October 26, 2022 Share Posted October 26, 2022 18 minutes ago, Reid Rosefelt said: So please @Wookiee reconsider. The forum is for us and we want to hear from him. We should have some say in that. If this doesn't happen we could ask Elon Musk to buy this site and give us total freedom of speech! 😉😉😉 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
InstrEd Posted October 26, 2022 Share Posted October 26, 2022 21 minutes ago, Reid Rosefelt said: So please @Wookiee reconsider. The forum is for us and we want to hear from him. We should have some say in that. Yes PLEASE reconsider. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Lawler Posted October 26, 2022 Share Posted October 26, 2022 Thank you Reid, Larry and MusicSoftware Deals. I think supporting deal posters with affiliate links is a fine idea. Alas, I usually -- U s u a l l y -- 😉 think a deal over for a few days, so when I decide to pull the trigger, I just google the publisher. I did make an effort to use Reid's BF deals because they were all in one place and easy to find. I am going to be making a better effort to track back to the affiliate posts on this forum (or on MusicSoftwareDeals, if that is where the tip came from). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wookiee Posted October 26, 2022 Share Posted October 26, 2022 Direct promotion of your own company in the text is a breach of the forum rules and amounts to free advertising. Make reference to a product in the body of a post, but no link is acceptable. Placing a link to your website, but no specific product in your signature is acceptable. These rules are what we all agreed to when creating our profile. Even the users name is pushing the rules to a certain extent. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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