Promoting your items in The new "Looking For" category

Hey folks,

Since the forum structural changes, we find ourselves getting more and more customers on our “Looking For” category who are seeking specific items to suit their projects. Some of these requests get answered, but many of them don’t. I believe there’s a great opportunity for authors to engage with customers and help them find an item that solves their needs.

Self promotion is something that we typically don’t allow on the forums (for kinda obvious “anti-spammy” reasons), however I think in principle we can should be adopt a different approach when a customer has actively asked for a recommendation, and in doing so, given permission to have author’s items presented to them.

With this in mind, with everyone’s cooperation, I would like to test an approach through which we lift the “self promotion” ban on the “Project Making, Looking For” category.

A few basic rules here, around this, just to keep things win-win…:sunglasses:

  1. The proposed item must exist for sale on Envato Market. Basic forum rules about linking to competitors still apply.

  2. The proposed item must serve the specifications (if any) listed by the customer in their request. Basically, don’t try and sell someone a portfolio theme if they’ve clearly said they’re looking for a theme for a restaurant.

  3. This kind of goes without saying, but don’t spam your items at customers.

This is an experiment, and if we get the vibe that people are doing the wrong thing we’ll roll it back, but I genuinely think folks will be pretty good.

Let me know your thoughts below!

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Wow! Thank you! This is precisely what we need to help customers find the right product! For example, I know my portfolio better than anyone else, and this is easier for me to offer the buyer a track from my portfolio.
Thank Envato! You are cool =)

What is new exactly? You mean that, before, authors could not respond to customer request threads??

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It was kind of a murky, undefined issue and, we never made an official ruling on it. Previously authors were technically allowed to reply to the requests on looking for, but according to the to the forum rules, they weren’t able to promote their own items, only the items of other authors. Sometimes this was enforced, other times it wasn’t. Either way it was never totally clear.

This post was intended to clear to murky-ness and make a formal decision on the issue.

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