tedster - 11:21 pm on Oct 22, 2004 (gmt 0)

Just so no one misunderstands, there are some kinds of links that we not only allow, we absolutely thrive on them:

1. YES - Authoritative educational material - sites such as the W3C, Microsoft, Apache, search engine guidelines, Mozilla.org, and Standards documents. These are lots more helpful than posting non-standard "cowboy code" opinions and guesswork. Bad information will live on, and be read for years and years, so we like to avoid it as much as possible.

2. YES - Timely authoritative and credible news stories - sites such as: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, PCWorld, Wired, The BBC, CNN, NBC (cbs,abc...etc).

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So what's out? Here are some guidelines, as I currently understand them (Brett may want to edit me, but I'll give it go.) These URLs are generally not allowed:

1. NO - Blogs, Forums, and Usenet - these are too full of opinion, agenda, and spin rather than dependable information
2. NO - Sites whose main purpose is to sell something
3. NO - Affiliate sites or links with affiliate code
4. NO - Unlinked urls -- if it's a genuinely "good" url, then it should be a REAL link

And yes, as noted above, moderators do exercise juudgement and there can be quite some latitude allowed in some of our forums compared to others. This is not really a double standard, it's a way of being human and acknowledging that some topical areas have different needs than others.