Discussion of advertising guidelines

Would highly recommend Shaun's training for anyone looking to learn Drupal module development.

Did a one day Drupal module development workshop with Shaun last year and went from tinkering and scratching my head trying to make simple module mods/form changes to having enough understanding to be building custom standalone search modules, ubercart postage calculation modules and more.

He does an awesome job of demystifying Drupal jargon and giving understanding of both the conceptual and low level stuff you need to know to start building modules.

I'm sure all his other training would be awesome as well.

Thanks for the kudos, Mbug! Unfortunately, I did not know that posting a commercial message on this group contravened usage guidelines for GDO, and I have been asked to remove this post.

Have a great day,
Shaun

What's the difference between Shaun posting his services here and someone posting a job opportunity? Both are commercial messages. Same coin, different side.

I'd rather have a free and open discussion where the occasional contractor can post his/her availability rather than a formal set of guidelines that become more of an effort than the original concern. Of course, if everybody posted commercial material, there would be some benefit in a more controlled moderation but it's really only a couple of messages a month.

It was Ryan (rcross) who contacted me and told me that my post contravenes the usage policy of the Australia group. I still haven't read the usage policy tbh, if anyone can send me a link, then I will. Anyway, I suggested to him something like a "Create Ad" option (in contrast to Create Discussion or Create Job) that would be suitable for these kinds of posts. As yet I don't qualify for the page that lists Drupal trainers.

+1 for gordons comment

Yes, it was I that felt this was an inappropriate post (not that any commercial activity is inappropriate) and I confirmed this with a brief discussion with Sime.

I would generally endorse Gordon's comment - that's why we have group moderators + mollom and not a lot of hard rules. This triggered my spam sensor for a few reasons:

1. it is posted as a discussion, which it is not. Since we don't have an "advertisement" or "reverse job" content type, I would have probably felt it was appropriate if it had been put as a job. I think it is reasonable to use the job content type this way in lieu of anything else and would support a guideline detailing that. Many people get email notices from this group and disable notices about job postings since they are not interested in the commercial activity.

As another point of reference, Rimian posted something a few months back that seemed to border on overt advertising however it turned into a bit more of a discussion about how to do site audits which I felt became more valuable and less spammy.

2. It wasn't a specific event (which would have been an event type) for a public course or anything. I understand the training and curriculum group regularly has posts in this regard and is where I first looked to see if they had other general advertisements like this which I didn't see.

3. As I pointed out in my email to Shaun, there is a place on d.o for training advertisements and there are guidelines for who can be listed there. This seems like the far more natural place to put content like this and I don't think that posting it on g.d.o should allow those guidelines to be by passed.

4. I think it sets a bad precedent. There is very little ability to moderate posts like this on a group-level basis and there are already a lot of moderation tickets around blatant link spam, trying to handle the grey area variations among groups would make it even harder. If we say that as long as one of the group admins knows the person and feels they contribute to the local community then its ok to advertise, g.d.o webmasters can't easily apply that and it feels a bit like cronyism. There are broader guidelines for advertising on Drupal to avoid this being a local issue.

P.S. Shaun, please don't take any part of this thread personally. As our group grows, this just happened to be something that triggered the need for this discussion. I have changed the title of this post so it better reflects this new discussion.

I think there are a few points in the discussion that need some clarification and another important point that has not yet been raised as far as I know.

To me, the definition of spamming is the process where someone sends out low quality, mostly irrelevant content in sufficient bulk so that a response rate slightly above zero becomes practical. Because it is mostly irrelevant to most recipients, it is mostly annoying and bulk means many thousands of messages.

On the contrary, Shaun's message is specifically targeted, of relevancy and a single instance of quality information. To me, this is the very opposite of spam.

On a regular basis, I refer project stake holders to our group. These people are looking for reliable developers and what better place is there than here for them to come. To remove content like Shaun's or my previous post would be doing this group a disservice. When I am busy, I know I can send referrals to developers like Shaun because the information here is to the point and backed up by peers in the industry. It's going to make me look bad if I refer one of my clients to some cowboy who I hardly know and the client ends up with a raw deal also. This content is helpful and (most importantly) shows initiative ie: training others. Remember, we are largely a group of developers, not a bunch of stinky hippies in a love commune.

My question is: Is it appropriate for a small group of developers to declare another small group of developer's discussions as "spammy" and have their content removed? It seems like a conflict of interest to me. And when Ryan's post that mentions my name and "spammy" in the same sentence has a signature at the bottom with three links to the commercial websites of the postee, it doesn't seem like the "spammy" argument stacks up very well. If anything was to be deleted, I'd rather it was that sentence but it's not really a big deal.

I think everyone here has good points and is trying to be constructive and honest. I wish to be clear that I don't want to offend any party involved also. I believe that my comment is constructive and I've felt compelled to comment as it has involved myself.

It seems like part of the problem here is we can't manage the type of content that Shaun has posted, not that the content itself is inappropriate.

Here is a link to my sock website:
http://www.wheresocksgo.com/