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I'm going to miss the Wonga puppets, they do kind of symbolise Wonga, though I suspect it won't be long before the whole image and name are consigned to history and a damage limitation re-brand.

But it seems those naughty puppets have still been on the airwaves corrupting countless Europeans after they were pulled from UK marketing channels. 

Spain has now stopped them and Poland and Youtube are apparently going to be puppet free by the end of the year.

According to the beeb:

"Some feared that young people would be so influenced by the marketing that they would be at greater risk of becoming addicted to debt as adults."

We may not be fans of Wonga or what they stand for, but as Barney has said previously, people need to be held accountable for their own actions.

Do you genuinely think the Wonga puppets were the cause of people going into debt and not realising the crippling interest rates?

Or is it a serious point and a harsh business model was being sanitised by clever and cuddly, even misleading advertising?

They had a good run but it's bye bye Wongies....

I'm part of the TV on demand generation so my viewing tends to be BBC iplayer and Amazon Prime and rarely watch "normal" telly, so I hardly see any adverts 

May have to watch some just to see how bad some of them actually are compared to the ones in this thread.

How about the forum? I'm game on

We've actually been here before: The Forum SEO Challenge

Back in 2010 an SEO firm Innocent Advertising did a similar thing.

To be fair they (he) achieved pretty good results in quite a short time, in an age when creating lots of spammy articles, anchor text and multitudes of low value links was in vogue and worked very well.

This is back in the day when anyone could wake up one day and declare themselves an SEO, with no skill or professionalism required, just a Digital Point and Warrior Forum account 

But the short termism approach was fundamentally flawed and I spent a few painful months disavowing and clearing up their mess when the forum was on it's old domain. Thanks Innocent for ducking those emails and burying your head 

So in this modern age of Google Panda's, Penguins, Hummingbirds and Structured Data can modern SEO's actually deliver a viable long term strategy, that conforms to best practices and meets Googles TOS?

More importantly is fully auditable and accountable to the client, so any progress can be closely monitored.

Be quite an interesting challenge, be sure to generate plenty of publicity and if the results were positive within an agreed amount of time, I might even put my hand in my pocket 

Originally Posted by mrb

“Admittedly, I'm not local to Surrey Claire but I helped somebody else on this forum based in Cornwall which is even further away from me.   

Happy to have a chat if you want to discuss anything even if you do decide to go local...”

Can certainly recommend Martin who helped out long suffering Turkey Farmer Pam and her major issues with her previous web designer

New Cornwall Turkeys web site

Worrying story on the BBC today, not so much the story itself, more the tone of language used and what it could mean.

"More than a quarter of sex offences are not being recorded as crimes by police in England and Wales, a watchdog says.

An HM Inspectorate of Constabulary report said the failure to record crime properly was "indefensible".

More than 800,000 - or one in five - of all reported crimes went unrecorded each year, it estimated."

Full story: BBC News

The headline grabber is sexual offences, but it refers to all crimes.

It's clear something needs to be done to tighten up Police process and procedures, something the Police will no doubt argue is directly related to reduced resources and increased workload.

But what really worried me was the language being used, particularly by Chief Inspector of Constabulary Tom Winsor.

He said the police should "immediately institutionalise" the presumption that the victim is to be believed.

"If evidence later comes to light which shows that no crime occurred, then the record should be corrected; that is how the system is supposed to work," he added.

So spin that, if the victim is presumed to be believed, then the other party is presumed to be guilty? After all you can't believe both parties can you?

Which then takes us into an official guilty until proven innocent policy which is a dangerous precedent IMHO.

Wouldn't it be better to say all alleged victim's of crime will be taken seriously and be fully investigated, before we start off down a witchhunt and vigilante culture as dwindling Police resources are already stretched to the maximum?

All crime should be reported and investigated, particularly sexual assault or abuse. But I think I prefer an impartial Policeforce rather than a judgemental one.

Or maybe we are there already, with now common place trial by media for anyone in the public eye or any crimes that spark media interest and sell advertising space 

Sniper Rifle re-issued mrb, along with yourself Dreamraven, good hunting 

Which has launched a campaign to force broadband providers to be more honest with their marketing. Currently superfast speed claims can be made if only 10% of the customers can actually achieve it, meaning for most of us it's a pipe dream.

Which are encouraging people to sign their petition to try and force advertising watchdogs to take action on confusing and misleading advertising.

You can join the petition here: Broadband Petition

So what is your broadband speed like?

Is it as advertised or do you feel disillusioned? Has anyone got any positive stories, is happy with their provider and happy with the price?

We use BT for the office but high speed broadband stopped about 4 miles up the road  It does the job, but isn't spectacular. 

You can do your own speed test from here: Broadband Speed Checker

Anyone get any worse results in their office or are we officially in the back of broadband beyond...

I dunno, she disappears for a year, pops back in and says hello, then disappears again!

Right young lady, are you staying this time??? 

On a serious note, great to have you back Sami and know you have had a pretty bad 18 months or so, but now looking forward to the old Dreamraven abusing spammers again!

The good news is you can tell us now when you plan to stop smoking    Whoops wasn't I supposed to say that... 

Interesting to see some of the quotes coming out of the recent G20 meeting.

According to the beeb:

"Red warning lights" are once again flashing over the state of the global economy, the prime minister has said.

Speaking after the G20 meeting of world leaders, David Cameron said a "dangerous backdrop of instability" threatened Britain's recovery, and "we should stick to our long-term plan".

What happened to the positivity of a few months ago?

Absolutely right. We moderate now in exactly the same way for positives as we do for negatives. It hasn't always been like that, but as reviews become more and more important, then they get gamed more and more, so moderation has to evolve. Different sites do things differently, but by and large it's gradually getting harder to game positive reviews across the board.

Local Trading Standards in general have a different approach for various Trusted Trader schemes, in that they actively pursue positive review generation to promote local traders, so it can give an impression of bias. But the idea is to allow consumers to select reliable tradespeople rather than build a rogues gallery. If a trader is generating consistent bad reviews or doesn't meet the code of conduct for the scheme, then they get booted off, hence why perspective may be skewed. 

Any positive reviews from an official Trusted Trader scheme have to be genuine, will normally require an invoice number for proof, can be monitored and spot checked, and is an offence if seen to be fraudulent.

But official Trusted Trader/Trading Standards schemes are purely designed for consumers to find reputable vetted tradespeople, not become a clone of Yelp or any commercial business directory.

CheckaTrade isn't an official Trading Standard Scheme. It has good credentials and a good track record, but it is in effect a directory of traders like many others and is a commercial business.