im on a heavy metal site, and the rule about plugging/advertising your own work is the same there, so what the owner of the site did, was set up a section of the forum called "Plug Your Stuff" by in which if we had anything such as blogs/bands/articles etc, we could post about them there. Any chance of something similar here? means that you dont have all the adverty type stuff being continually removed, but put into a specific place so people can have a look at what other people get up to
well, more so the actual posting of them with more explanation, i can see what you mean Erebh, but i was more thinking if someone had something they really wanted to shout about. the signature isnt exactly the largest place to do that
I am vehemently opposed. We have had enough problems with members joining solely for self-promotion. They don't contribute, they scheme and wheedle.
Playing Devil's Advocate for a moment (as in general I'm opposed to the idea too), what about if such a section had rules like the Workshop, where anybody wanting to use the section would have to have been a member for a time and have made a recognizable contribution to the forum? Maybe even more stringent rules too, such as member for six months and having made fifty decent critiques and also is a 'Supporter' to the forum? The disadvantage of course is that such rules would have to be enforced, but as they would be so stringent it would be pretty easy to weed out inappropriate people. Perhaps they would also have to apply to use the section, and so denied permission by default.
This is such an easily solved problem. You simply make number of posts and length of time on the forum a condition of posting in the promo sub-forum, as Ian also suggests. I think one could set this up in a number of different ways so it worked automatically. And as an additional safeguard it could be a moderated sub-forum. A mod, at their convenience, could approve of any new thread. As it is now, they end up reading all those promotional posts and deleting the threads, so the work load shouldn't be any worse as long as the requirements to post in the thread in the first place limited the new threads. I think such a sub-forum would be useful for all those things we want to share with each other that we cannot now. I don't care about promoting a book, that would be a one time post and you couldn't keep bumping the thread, so it's not of much use for promotion. But announcing you've published with a link to the book, that's exciting. Or when I linked to a short story submission call and it was considered promoting when that wasn't my intent at all. I just wanted to share what I'd found.
The forum architecture actually allows for this, @GingerCoffee . Right now there is only one kind of mod that is currently active, Super Moderator. There is a "mini-mod" status that has been used in the past for things very similar to what you mention. The RPG sub-forum, I think, still has one. Not sure. I don't go in there. Regardless, a precedent exists. If someone were interested in volunteering for such a position, I can't see why it would be doomed by default. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, but who's to know if it's never tried, aye?
There is no way we are going to have an open "plug your stuff" forum. You can include a link to your blog or project in your signature if it's not viewed as being there solely to advertise. In the future we may have a writing marketplace forum where products/services/projects can be posted for a small fee. Additionally we may add a Resources/Mentorship/Accomplishments. However, depending on what your project is, they may or may not be appropriate in these forums once they're added.
