Should covert advertising be considered spamming? I’m thinking of samara11 . I’m one of the people wanting to refresh my very very basic Arabic, but I don’t want to see advertising in the forum.
While I have nothing against advertising per se, signing up clearly for the single purpose of posting advertisements in the forum should be prohibited. I would have no problem if the user had already made valuable contributions to the community and wanted to let people know he/she had created a product that could be of some use (as Steve did on the HTLAL forum, before being inexcusably banned), but using the forum for NO OTHER REASON than as a vehicle to promote a product should be a deletable/bannable offense. It just causes clutter and risks turning the place into a free-for-all. I hope the ability to add and assign moderator duties will be available soon. I doubt a spam filter would be particularly effective.
In this case the post about Arabic was not offensive, and if this service can help people I am not too concerned. If it becomes repetitive we may have a problem. What do others think?
Chris what would a moderator do? Just delete spam?
I agree the post wasn’t offensive, it’s just that forums very often get hit with repetitive advertisements from different people that cause unnecessary clutter and degrade the place.
If I can slightly qualify the tone of my previous post, I might add that having a separate forum installed for promoting potentially helpful products might not be a bad idea. I’m certainly not one of those folks who is opposed to promoting products and services on a forum just because it has commercial intent. I hate it when admins and mods get anal about that.
Regarding moderators, they have the ability to delete posts, yes. In addition to that, they can also move threads that are in the wrong forum, close threads and ban spammers. They’re basically maintenance staff. A good idea for the future I think would be to assign moderator positions to people from various time zones so that there is some measure of security and maintenance during each period of the day. That way you don’t wake up one morning and find a forum or two flooded with porn and viagra adverts.
This forum is not open to google or any other search engine. Isn’t it?. Because the whole site is password protected.
So I wouldn’t worry about porn or casino spammers. This site does not appeal to them.
I agree with Steve, I wouldn’t worry about the arabic spammer unless he becomes repetitive.
As against most bad things in life, it’s better to have zero tolerance for them right from the beginning.
As it has happened only twice - once a few weeks before Christmas and the most recent post - I suppose I can live with it. As I said, I am interested in Arabic and will investigate the language further. It’s only a pity that Samara11 is using this sort of approach instead of writing about her site directly.