The Administrators of "E-bikes For People Over 50" have a very bad habit of annoying their members by deleting posts and comments with links when they feel as though they are trying to help someone with a link to a product or service they support.
If you're someone who has had their post or comment deleted while trying to help someone, your initial reaction will be anger, and you would have every right to feel that way given that your intention was to help someone.
With that said, we have been labeled authoritarians, free speech deniers, power hungry fools, and recently someone accused us of being like an HOA. In all honesty, we do admit to being like a good HOA. Good HOA's create rules to enhance the value of your investment and prevent others from devaluing your investment.
Why we delete posts and comments with links.
The majority of new members never read the rules of the group. If you were to read the group rules, we go into detail as to why we do not allow posting links.
From the inception of this group, we have never allowed links allowing people to sell products and services. Why would we allow people to profit from our work when we do it with no pay or compensation of any kind? Our generosity is limited to our love of e-bikes and the benefits it provides to active seniors. We have NO generosity reserved for profiteers and spammers trying to use our work to benefit themselves.
"Well", you say, "but I only posted a link because someone asked my opinion on what to buy and I was just trying to help them." Even if that is true, we have no way to disseminate between people who post a link to help vs someone posting a link to use the platform for personal gain.
If you know anything about affiliate selling, you will know these people are anonymous and are provided special links where they are commissioned when purchases occur through the links they provide (their links are identical to yours). It's not possible to disseminate between their links to profit and your helpful innocent link.
For the record we understand the ease of copy and pasting links vs typing out a description of the product or service you are referencing. The other reason we disallow links is to protect the links of our "Group Experts".
Group Experts
Recently Facebook created a new badge label for "Group Expert". As administrators of the group, we are authorized to assign this badge to e-bike professionals of our choice. These professionals are currently the ones giving you the answers to your questions and have vast knowledge of e-bike operations, maintenance and repairs. We identify these professionals through our website (www.ebikesover50.com) by offering them a premium membership for only $1 per month (verification process). The membership is only available to industry professionals. In exchange for their advice and group assistance we offer them a "Group Expert" badge next to their name as well as a free business listing on our website, and the ability to post links to their products and services in our Facebook group in the comments section. We make every attempt to ensure the experts are in fact Industry professionals.
LET ME BE PERFECTLY CLEAR HERE TO AVOID CONFUSION: You do not need to be a premium member here to qualify for a "Group Expert" badge. Facebook allows admins to choose group experts. We choose to use verified industry professionals as Group experts. All of our Premium members are verified industry professionals which makes it easy for us to determine and consider them group experts. The membership fee they pay is not for a Facebook badge, but for the benefits they receive from our website. Thus, professional pre-verification is inherent in the membership which enables us to offer them Group Expert status.
Going forward everyone should continue to know that only Administrators and Group Experts will be allowed to post links. All other links will be vigorously identified and removed.
Hopefully this clarifies our position regarding links.
Happy e-biking
I'm sorry, but I've never seen or heard of a "good" HOA. They're just a bunch of power-hungry tattle-tales who live to exert authority in SOME way in their lives, usually when they have none anywhere else in life. No homeowner has ever uttered the phrase "Man, I am so glad the Marge from two houses over kept my property value up by measuring blades of grass and had me fined because one was 1/16" too tall." It's usually a not-so-well hidden way to keep out "undesirables".
I understand the rules just fine thanks, I still do not agree with ANY individual be allowed to post links to their products and services particularly if they are paying even $1 for the right of the special badge. I have never seen this on ANY other Ebike page, It does not allow the rest of us who are not "in the buisness" as you say, but still have plenty of miles and exp on the road to do the same.