URL posting

[Sinner_G]

Every day there are lots of messages including URLs to personal sites and of course after each one 2-3 answers with links to the forum guidelines.

As I am sure that noone does that knowingly (posting URLs I mean), wouldn't it make sense to have the guidelines sent automatically via sticky to each new user? And them directed to their inbox after joining?

Just a thought.

[agerhart]

That is a good suggestion Sinner, but the fact of the matter is that while some URL drops are innocent, a lot of them are done intentionally. Some people spam the forums in an attempt to promote their sites.

[Brett_Tabke]

I've invited the mods and users to write a set of guidelines that will work many times. Unfortunatly, if you set them, members would find away around them within a few hours. There's really no 'one size fits all' on url drops. There's several older threads about here.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[Sinner_G]

I may be a bit naive, but I still think a lot of URL drops are not intentional, like most of the 'please check my code' threads, which are mostly resolved by putting the URL in the profile.

I know the sticky would not do anything against spammers, but it would help newbies.

And Brett, I think the guidelines are as good as they can get now, they just have to be better known.

[Brett_Tabke]

We are more about education. We'd rather show people the applicable section in a CSS manual than show them where there code is wrong. It's one of the prime motivators to the tos and applicable charters showing we "don't do site reviews". We try to extend that to code reviews as much as possible (doesn't always work). It's that old, "give a man a fish" parable - we'd rather show them how to fish on their own.

Also keep in mind, that we are mostly a promotion and marketing forum. There's hardly anyone here who doesn't have something to promote or market. Most of us do it more by accident than on purpose.

[Sinner_G]

>There's hardly anyone here who doesn't have something to promote or market.

Ok, I'm the exception then. And I see WMW more as a forum for advice/help than marketing & promotion.

And as for the fish parable, I have always learned better by looking how someone does something than by reading it up in a manual. It may be only true for the sections about programming and the like, but I have the feeling that the whole web is about copy/paste from others. That's the way people learn on this medium.