Quote Originally Posted by gllt View Post
I think it's a little conspiracy brained to assume every person posting shout chat ads is trying to circumvent your personal filters to advertise to you
Yes and no. Not every advertiser is doing it on purpose but some definitely are. A good chunk of higher venue management are advertisement optimizers because it directly impacts having consistent incoming traffic to the venue as opposed to spikes that fade away because people leave at various times. Things that I did personally or knew that other people did in terms of optimizing/competition (some of these are considered bad by the community but still done by some parties):

- Controlling the locations that a shoutrun is performed at
- Controlling the length of the post based on feedback
- Controlling the details of the post based on feedback
- Controlling the location of the details in the post (what catches eyes/attention first)
- Controlling the timing of each shoutrun lap
- Controlling the amount of PF's posted (the more PF's hosted, the more you're at the top of the list)
- Controlling the spacing of PF's posted (spreading them out averages a higher time at the top)
- Controlling the timing of the shoutrun post itself to push out another venue's ad from someone shout's chat (posting right after so the game auto-scrolls and kicks it out)
- Posting more eye catching PF designs before and after someone's PF to dwarf that singular PF attention wise
- "accidently" hitting in-venue advertising macros while at other venues
- shoutrunning route edited to include shoutrunning in housing wards that are known to be populated by a venue/collab doing an outside event
- having multiple shoutrunners unrestricted on the same data center that leads to chat spam and overlap such as double posting from different people
- someone on twitter mentioned a location having someone sending tells advertising in Limsa instead of shout chat
- Yell/Say and Shout chat advertisement message to bypass people who have Shout chat disabled