LES Deal Bot
All right, so here's the deal (pun intended):
Wishosting, MrVM (and likely other providers) have a custom category in WHCMS / Blesta with products / deals that can be scraped by a bot. This bot can then post these offers on LES. Any provider can apply, even the ones not participating here yet. This makes it a bit more easy on providers as they have to put less effort in posting offers. This also allows them to roll rotating offers that automatically get posted here (e.g. daily / weekly specials). Also, everyone gets a fair chance. The regular way of posting offers would still remain and at least a handful of providers will have to participate from the start to make it fair.
I'm honestly not even sure if this is a good idea so let's have the discussion here 
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Considerations are as follows:
- Is this beneficial for providers?
- Is this beneficial for the community members / potential buyers?
- Should the deals be posted in a single thread, a category (a discussion per offer) or should we have a widget that displays a random offer on the homepage?
Comments
This is something that could be considered as advertising.
Instead of embedding gifs with ”random” messages as done on most other websites, this would be an alternative option.
My vote, if implemented, would be as a widget.
Less and more direct text on the package offered.
One product/service, not many in a long post.
From a provider point of view, this would make my life easy in the sense that I wouldn’t have to write long offer posts.
I could also create the group in WHMCS as hidden, making it more special for this community.
Would it be beneficial for the community members? Not that it would bring anything new to the table.
If this feature is not enabled, they will probably just look in the offer category.
It would, in one way, be the same as LEBFeed, hopefully with ”better” content. ?
“Technology is best when it brings people together.” – Matt Mullenweg
Could I suggest adding some way to account for providers with a lot of offers possibly getting more exposure than a provider with a single offer?
Perhaps randomize it first by provider, then by offer?
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I agree with @mikho. This should be somewhat like an advertising channel in a widget form. However, it should not replace making offer threads because a large part of making threads is also to generate user discussion, which helps to increase sales too. This widget is probably a lot more helpful as general advertising platform for lurkers who may just want to see all available deals quickly and grab one instead of trawling the offers section. I think this feature is serves another niche that is currently not served in LES.
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Very good points, 1,2,3 would probably be easy to implement but the 4th point, would that be possible? To distingguish the difference in the offer, is it a dedicated or VPS? monthly or annual price tag?
Perhaps hard to implement in the beginning but something to consider.
“Technology is best when it brings people together.” – Matt Mullenweg
It's definitely possible but to start off small I'd say we moderate the deals. If a provider repeatedly posts deals that are not conform the rules we can always remove them from the feed after repeated warnings.
Interesting. Let's see where this goes
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So basically a LES only serverhunter that'll push to forum like LEB offers on LET?
Websites have ads, I have ad-blocker.
Personally, I think this sounds cool but doesn't really provide any benefits other than the provider not having to create a thread.
I imagine a lot of users are on mobile - where is a widget going to display that doesn't either get in the way at the top, break content in the middle or be hidden at the bottom?
If offers are posted to one thread that gets updated then people will miss great offers because eventually it will just end up with the bright yellow "X NEW" tag like all the other threads. If you sticky it then eventually there is going to be lots of stickies at the top and they get in the way.
We already have a category - Offers - so they could go in there but then why can't providers just post bespoke threads like they do now?
Anyway, not trying to shit all over your idea or be a dick - just giving my thoughts
If that would be so easy, its not.
Scrapping stuff, especially offers is not easy, one typo and the bot dismisses the offer or does not read it correct
Especially on WHCMS you can input any shit you like.
You can correct lower and upper case easy and additional space there and there.
But missing things, is fatal.
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Your feedback is appreciated - even if it isn't positive
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My thoughts are that:
PROS:
1. Anything that provides exposure of quality deals is good.
2. Makes it simple enough for hosts to have deals running at all times.
3. Can be displayed none intrusively in the side bar or something.
CONS:
1. Waters down the need to post offers, i.e. set and forget.
2. Would need to be coded in a maintenance free way due to volume.
3. Hard to moderate as it becomes part of the furniture.
GENERAL/SPECS:
1. Would need to be time limited so that someone does not set one in 2019 that is still up in 2022 that no one has been able to buy past the first week.
2. Would probably need to have a different rule set to the general offers rules in order to promote diversity of offers.
ALTERNATIVE IMPLEMENTATION SUGGESTION:
Rather than a WHMCS scraper it may actually be better setup/coded as a plugin to vanilla that only those with host tags have whereby they just fill in 3 fields:
TITLE: 'Inception Hosting 256MB KVM - UK - €9 p/year'
LINK: 'https://clients.inceptionhosting.com/cart.php?a=add&pid=183'
VALID UNTIL: 7, 14, 21, 28 days
Title is what is displayed, limited to xx characters.
Link is the link that what is displayed (title) takes you too.
Valid Until is how long the host wants to display it, they cannot post another until that xx days from posting is over.
I think this method has the advantage of forcing participation rather than passive advertising, not having potentially unattended products displaying on the forum and makes it more like an in house twitter feed of specials with expiration dates, is a perk of being a host here, keeps things fresh for the community.
If the host cant catch your eye within 80 - 140 characters you were never interested in knowing the further details to begin with, offers opportunities for site monitization through 1% affiliate links and more to the point, equal opportunity advertising without flashy 125x125 banners in the future to pay for these sorts of developments while being none in your face to customers.
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Spinning on @AnthonySmith post, perhaps the placement is better on a wiki page?
Something labeled: Current special deals from providers featured on LowendSpirit
And listing all providers special deals on that page.
Then there is nothing cluttering up the "flow" of vanilla. If the bot scrapes the providers special deals group twice a day and update the page then there would be very little maintenance.
The provider will get some "feedback" if there are special deals posted that no longer is available, etc.
“Technology is best when it brings people together.” – Matt Mullenweg
First of all thanks @Solaire.
Just throwing some opinions here...
I like the widget approach to rotate "special offers". Either through scraping or with a plugin I think it would be better to do this in a set & forget way. This widget should be responsive and also could be monetized since its a noble space.
I am with @poisson about the concept that the widget cannot replace sales threads. But I'm in doubt if these threads should be automatically fed or not. We may have stock issues, provider could forget about an old offer etc. We have to consider what could possible go wrong.
BF/CM - Buyer Beware. Conduct your own due diligence on the sustainability of the deals presented here as well as the provider's track record.
Appreciate the feedback guys! Taking the suggestion of @AnthonySmith and @ITLabs to heart, let's say we ditch the scraper and allow Hosting Providers to set some basic info somewhere here in Vanilla.
Then, we could display it somewhere at the top of the discussion page:
That looks good. A different one every refresh.
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@Solaire I like the google ads style for mobile, more due to a lack of space I suppose, however for desktop how about:
rational: I don't like the idea of pushing threads below the fold where possible
Additionally I believe some modifications to plugin: 'profileextender' would be able to gather all the data required.
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@Solaire thanks. Mobile design seems really good. I like the idea of having a right sidebar widget as suggested by Ant for desktop.
BF/CM - Buyer Beware. Conduct your own due diligence on the sustainability of the deals presented here as well as the provider's track record.
Appreciate the feedback guys. For now this obviously doesn't have much of a priority, but when we go around to implement this your feedback will be put to use