On 2002-01-23 08:05, jbarter wrote:
Would it be possible to set up a commercial forum? Would it cause too much extra work for Dale and Rich or raise a lot of technical problems?
(I apologize for the length of this post; there’s quite a bit of board history involved here. I do encourage you to plod through it, though; I address the question of a commercial-post-specific forum at the end.)
It’s not really a technical issue. There are a bunch of issues involved; none are technical, some are social, and some at this point are historical.
First of all, one of the reasons we ended up running the board ourselves rather than going with an “Add a free web-board to your site!” provider was that we had a particularly bad experience with Coolboard, who hit resource limits (read: ran out of monkey) and started putting ads everywhere to try to make up for it – multiple banners and popup ads and on-close ads and so on. So one of the selling points of this board – although not the main one – was that it was ad-free.
That was particularly important because of the board’s first home. For the first few months, the board was hosted on a server at Concordia University, who was then my employer. They’re really open about providing resources for free to interesting projects (even when they’re not particularly academic), but they’ve a very strict rule about commercial use of their systems – namely, that there isn’t any. So that’s the historical grounds of the restrictions on commercial posts.
Now, Dale and I didn’t really think about text posts when we were keeping it non-commercial, but it soon became apparent that there was going to be a lot of self-promotion on the board. Eventually, something had to be done; there were enough commercial posts that I felt I was stretching Concordia’s acceptable use policy (which it was my responsibility not only to obey, but enforce!), and there were a significant number of people sending mail to us complaining that it was getting out of hand. Since we had both legal and social reasons to limit it, Dale came up with a series of rules (the first one or two didn’t have the intended effect) in order to keep things reasonably noncommercial.
When I realized that the board was busier than I expected it to be by about an order of magnitude, I decided that it was inappropriate to use Concordia’s resources for it (since bandwidth to the commercial Internet is relatively expensive compared to that to other academic sites) and moved the board to a server owned by a friend of mine, Chris Petro. His machine is a perk of his job, so he lets friends use it for their own projects. There wasn’t any official anticommercial policy there, but most of the projects were open-source software, so there didn’t seem to be any reason to change the previous policy, given that the complaints about commercialism had, beyond the occasional incident, stopped.
I’ve now got my own server colocated in Montreal, and the board was recently moved there. So there are no more contractual reasons for the commercial-posts rule, but I don’t think that’s a reason to change anything. Back when the board saw commercial posts proliferating, there was too much of it, and the complaints certainly had a valid basis. We obviously don’t want to go back to that point. Given that the only problems with the current scenario (excluding the “problem” of not being able to post commercially more than once a month) is that occasionally there’s a bit of heavy-handedness and hurt feelings regarding it (which, if anything, suggests that there is still a need for the rule!), I don’t see any incentive to change the status of the existing groups.
That said, jbarter suggests a commercial forum. This would, admittedly, give those who want it a place to make their commercial posts, and keep them out of the discussion forums for those who don’t want them there. But I’m really not particularly thrilled with the idea of using resources that I pay for out of pocket to provide a free advertising venue. Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m more than happy to provide a place for the board, and I don’t expect any compensation for that – but a forum specifically for advertising is pushing things a little farther than I’m prepared to donate.
Apologies again for my longwindedness. I hope that sheds some light on the historical and social context of the rules on advertising on the forums.
Yer webmonkey,
