Why are referral links forbidden, while commercial spam is allowed?

Because you give someone a gain with a referral and if it was allowed people would spam it in all places.
1 people posting deals atleast is just as it is, 1 person, not saying that makes it "better" because if every store would do it, it's still spam.

I'd say if you gain from it (either it's your ref link or your store) then it should be forbidden. If you are just sharing a deal you think is good or a gleam giveaway with ref links which are not related in any way to you, it should be allowed.

The difference is that we do want threads about deals and we get one thread per bundle / sale.
What we don't want is that everyone starts dropping their referrals here, because you'd see far more than just one per event then. And that is the difference between acceptable promotion / information and real spam.

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Not sure what minor store you're referring to. I hardly see any commercial spam on the forum. There's one store that posts about giveaways, and I remember DIG posting about bundles, but that's about all I remember.

I don't really mind but what always puzzles me is that the deals are always horrible since it's mostly games that have been bundled before but at 5x the price and there still will be people saying it's a great deal just because they like the game. I mean I love Terraria but I wouldn't call 50 % off an amazing deal considering it had much steeper discounts. But the problem would be how to distinguish between good informational threads about deals like Rachel's threads or when DIG used to make their own Bundle threads and the ones we're talking about.

Your pol is biased, because 1 person creating 1 topic / posting 1 post informing about the sale is hardly a spam. Unlike 100s of people spamming their referral links for personal monetary gain / better chances in GAs etc ;)

Forbid both, imho.

Easily all solvable by literally having a referral link thread, stickied at the top of the page and every other ref link post being taken down.

I see a lot of posts about the fact that it's just one guy making one posts about one shop, while referalls would be thousands or something. I don't think that's how you design rules, but maybe that's just me.

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the thread and poll are misleading
I've not noticed much spam at all. I don't consider a thread with a deal where lots of people actually discuss stuff in and actively use them to check stuff to be spam.

There are referral links that only benefit the person who created them and there are referrals that benefit both parties. The first one is obviously bad, the second one isn't that bad but people would flood the forums with them. I don't think stores should be able to promote here since they're still profiting from it, but on the other hand people want to know about deals. I don't agree with those Gleam giveaways that have referral links in them either, but people here go crazy over any free game. In conclusion: the benefits from referral links aren't good enough for people to tolerate the spam.

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If people could freely post referrals here then the site would soon be overloaded with people spamming referrals in the hope of making a fraction of penny from stuff most likely cheaper elsewhere through a thousand different links in a thousand different topics. But people generally want to hear about genuinely good deals at least once. I'd say just leave that up to the mods.

where's the promo spam you talk about?
you mean bundle/discount threads?

What is a referral? (real question)

So I never really understood what's wrong with referral links and whom they harm

If they were allowed, they'd be spammed constantly, and not just by one person ... they'd quickly become an annoyance and clutter the (already cluttered) forums ...

How would you intend to police referral links? Should ones from these illegal underage gambling sites be allowed? and if not, should they be allowed to cry that you can post your referral links and not them?

Allow both, but referrals only with disclosure! So the GA creator would need to write near the link that it's a referral link. (Not that it isn't obvious by looking at the URL, but still, some users may not notice, and transparency is best.)

Edit: sorry I assumed you were talking about links in GA descriptions, on the forums both should be forbidden imho. In the GAs at least you get something in exchange for being exposed to the link/spam, while in the forums it's just clutter.