Posting guidelines for incense companies and sellers

March 27, 2014 at 10:38 am (Administrative, Mike)

I’ve been noticing something of an uptick in posts by incense companies of late although you probably wouldn’t notice as I don’t tend to let most of these through. Olfactory Rescue Service is a site aimed to be a resource for the incense consumer and so I don’t think it’s a good idea to allow companies to spam the site with links. Most of the time this is really obvious, like when a company will post in a thread that’s over 3 or 4 years old and has had no comments on it in just as long. To me there’s no effort to be a part of the community here, which is one good way for me to be able to tell if there’s a balanced approach to being here.

So what’s the balanced approach? Well, I’m definitely far more inclined to let posts like this through when they’re being informative and specifically addressing a person’s question. But in allowing a post like this through, then I don’t expect the frequency of this to go up to where these comments are dominating the feed. It’s not OK, just because you carry a particular brand of incense, to spam your company link on that page. I don’t buy spam-generated stuff like “I love your website” and then a link to an incense company. You won’t see most of this stuff here because we won’t let it through.

On the other hand, I’d like to think I’m approachable and I do want to get the word out there about reputable and honest incense suppliers and companies. So if you are one of these companies and would like to touch base, my contact information is on the About page. This is a much more effective route to getting the word spread. On the other hand if your company is one of those that makes synthetic perfume on charcoal stick kind of stuff, then this site probably isn’t right for you either.

Also, to many of these companies, this is not an incense retail site except for an occasional boutique kind of thing from one of our staff. So inquiries into sales, will not be addressed or replied to, particularly because this should be very obvious from a cursory look at things here, it tells me you’re not really paying attention.

Anyway questions on this page are welcome here, with the caveat that some things just aren’t up for discussion and browbeating and bullying me or my staff over the rules isn’t something I’ll tolerate or even humor. Yes there are some incense companies that will occasionally post here and the reason they do is because they understand the balance here and what is trying to be achieved. We’d of course like that to be true for everybody.