A rant about "approved" recips

[MeatPounder]

Recips were always a sore spot with me.
For awhile there every list made their buttons gaudier and gaudier trying to become the focal point of every free site landing page.
Free sites started looking like carnival sites...and ugly as hell. Each button had to be bigger and more attention grabbing than the next, style went out the door.

Then the value of text links came into vogue, and many rushed to have paragraphs of text in their recips...bold marques blurting out LOOK AT ME!!!!

Then link lists started demanding WHO they were on the page with (not all but some even here from GG&J members) It became commonplace in the rules to see link lists demanding all their fellow recips on the free site had to be PR4 , or if they were on the page their other sites or partners sites had to be on the page too (hell several had 3-4 different linklists in their own recips!)

Then damn it all came the categories, every link list had several dozen (if not more) cats and they wanted the recips to point to the specific category...recip tables became a nightmare....if you submited to a dozen or more niches, you had to have 25-40 recip tables at the minimum...lol)
This is all not to mention specific fonts and table dimensions and text colors in the recips and trying to get that all to work with your design.

I finally got to the point of going all custom text recips...nice ones with keywords specific to the individual link lists.

If a link list accepted that, I submitted, if they didn't I crossed them off my submit list and moved on (no matter how good their traffic was)

After all, the freesite is my sales tool...and within reason I design them to make sales not to be listed. Being listed is not my primary purpose in creating a site, earning money is.
And I've found most link list owners will accept a well designed free site that follows reasonable rules