> Slow Travel Forums > Help

Rules for Bloggers and Business Owners

These are our rules for how to post on these forums if you run, or are affiliated with, a travel business, travel website or a blog.

Bloggers

We welcome bloggers to post on our forums and encourage you to keep on blogging - we love blogs! We also want to keep our Slow Trav discussions focused while we offer travelers the most updated and relevant information. To give readers information about active travel blogs yet prevent the forums from being peppered with random "Look at my Blog!" posts, we have the following rules:

  • If you will be traveling and blogging about your trip, post your announcement in the "Blogging from..." thread at the top of the appropriate country forum. Just one post per trip or country visited, please. People who want to comment about your blog will be directed to do so directly on the blog, and not in the thread
  • You may NOT post solely for the purpose of recommending your blog. Do not start a thread just to get people to go to your blog.
  • If you have travel information on your blog and someone asks a question that one of your blog entries answers, you may post a link to the page, but be sure to include some basic information in the post, don't just link to your page.

If we feel you have posted just to promote your blog, we will delete your post. Please put a link to your blog in your signature! That appears on all your posts.

Note that these rules do not apply to bloggers running their blogs on the SlowTrav website.

Travel Business Owners

We welcome people in the travel business to take part in our forums, but we ask that you NOT promote your business in your posts. If you post in any way that we think is promoting your business, your post will be deleted.

We have these strict rules because we want these forums to remain a place for discussion, not a place for promotion of goods and services. Our goal is to keep the forums as commercial-free as possible, so that our members are not being "sold to" when they are reading the forums. We ask all businesses to respect this.

We ask that all travel businesses consider taking out a paid classified listing on the Slow Travel website to support our site and forums and to communicate your business information to Slow Travelers. www.slowtrav.com/cl/

Please follow these guidelines:

  • Do NOT put your domain name as your member name. For example, while John Smith is an acceptable member name, JohnSmith.com is not (nor is JohnSmith.org, or any other extension). If you do this, we will edit your profile and change your member name, any extensions will be removed and appropriate spacing added.

  • You may include a link to your website in your profile and your signature. The link in your signature must be a simple link displaying either the URL or the business name - it cannot be a long advertising phrase. If you put an advertising phrase in your signature, we will remove it. You can link to only ONE website. If you have a Slow Travel Classified, you may include your "caption" from the classified as a link to the classified. If you run a blog, you may link to it. See below for more information on signatures.

  • You may NOT post recommending your business.

  • If you have travel information on your website and someone asks a question that your page answers, you may post a link to the page, but be sure to include some basic information in the post, don't just link to your page.

If we feel you have posted in a thread just to have your signature with your website displayed and there is not good content in your post, we will delete the post. For example, "You will love Tuscany" by a poster with vacation rentals in Tuscany linked to in their signature. This post would be deleted. However, if you posted with some interesting information about traveling in Tuscany, we would not view it as a commercial post.

Member Names and Signatures

Read our Rules for Signatures and Member Names.

Back to top