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Our rules have prohibited promoting your own site for many year. I know that, because I wrote them. See hereOriginally Posted by AndyCr15
The site you link too certainly appears to be your own, and in any event, it is certainly commercial, or has commercial aspects.
If you wish to promote your own site, at the very least, as per the rules, you need to contact HEXUS for permission, and as the site has commercial aspects, my reply would be to refer you to the business people at HEXUS, as per the link in our rules. What they would say, I don't know.
However, as for providing links, had anyone not involved with the site done it, it would be different. We have also been ignoring the links in your sig. But when you provide a link on our site that takes visitor to your site in order to read the information, we see that as taken people from us to you.
"Spamming" comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, and what you're doing is certainly not the form we usually see. If it was, we'd simply have banned the account .... which is after all what the rules say we will do for unapproved commercial posts. But that's not the case here, and the line is rather greyer. But "spamming" is the term we use in the rules to cover unapproved commercial "pimping", and without getting pedantic over descriptions in the rules, it'll do.
Posting your full review isn't exactly a massive job. I reckon it would take me a couple of minutes to do it. Given the sig links, it's not exactly difficult for anyone that wants to to follow up on the rest of the site. But, if you "won't bother" to do that, it does rather seem that the objective wasn't so much to provide useful information to our members but to attract site visitors.
Andy, HEXUS has been doing this for many years. We're a decent size and we get a lot of people seeking to gain advantage from that, some in a fairly small way, as you did, and some in a much more overt and obnoxious fashion. It's a spectrum .... and we have to draw a line somewhere. Where we draw it is when you post that the review is coming, then post again that it's there, and draw people away from this site merely to get at the information. It's not a courteous way to behave on a site, especially when it's clearly prohibited in our rules.
Andy, think on this.
I started a digital photography site with a friend some years ago. It's still going and I'm still involved with it. It does not have any commercial aspects, and I do have permission from this site's owner to "pimp" it. But do you see me doing it? The link is not in my sig, nor my profile. I post on our digital photography forum here, but very rarely do I mention that other site. Some people here here know about it (and some are members), but I'd bet a lot do not. Why? Because I don't see it as courteous to "pimp" even my own site, despite permission to do so.
There's a line, Andy ... and taking visitors away from here to your own site in that way crosses it, I'm afraid.
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But, all the appearances of your site is that it's a bit more than a purely personal hobby site. But we can only judge by what we see when we look at the site, which is precisely why we require people to get permission to promote their site. That way, we get to ask questions, and we avoid misunderstandings. Either you'd get told "yes", in which case there's no problem, or you'd get told "no", in which case you'd know where you stood, or you'd get referred to the advertising department and it's our of forum mod's hands. But when posts just appear without that discussion, all we can do is call it how we see it. That's what we've got here.
