URL Posting

Let's revisit the rules so everyone understands

[SEOMike]

Let's clear up the URL posting issues sometimes seen here

Here's the TOS's mention of URLs:

1st mention:

Please don't drop promotional urls, signature files, nor specifics that would lead people to your site.

2nd mention:

Affiliate based URLs are not allowed anywhere on the system.

3rd mention:

Self promotional URL drops and whisper campaigns are strictly forbidden within the forums and will be edited out.

As long as a URL is informational and not affiliated with you, it should be good for posting. Posting of URLs for informational purposes is good for the group. Kudos to the moderators for weeding out the SPAM links with about 80% accuracy.

Now my question for discussion... Is this policy still sufficient enough or does it need to contain different scenarios to keep with the times?

[engine]

Let me just add, at the top of each forum is the forum-specific charter link and that often refers to issues relating to the particular forum. Two examples...

Here's the WebmasterWorld Community Center Charter [webmasterworld.com]

Here's the Google News charter [webmasterworld.com] which is somewhat more comprehensive.

[cooldoug]

If someone has a question, can you refer them to an external url? Or would that be a violation?

[Brett_Tabke]

We want to point to authoritative sources. On news matters, that would be sites such as:

BBC,new york times, wired, abc, zdnet, nbc, cnet, cbs,pbs, reuters, cnn, ap, upi,etc...

We do *not* want to link to:

freds blog, spankys summer guest book, etc...

Nor to company mouth peices like /blogs...etc.

OpEd and PR sites are almost 100% always out of the question (eg blogs, press releases, and anything with a large affiliate banner ad on it).

In other words, we want authoritative sources.

We want to link to the W3C css documentation and not zippys css tutorial page.

We almost almost always never want the reply of any post to be "check here" with a url link.

We want to be a community site first, an education site second, and a "resource" site third.