Re: SPAM DB has been released

"Mark C. Stock" <mcstockX_at_Xenquery .com> writes:

>i finally looked up the original PEAR DB announcement ... even though
>it was non-profit-ware, it was definitely a marketing announcement
>and, yeah, the poster was obviously looking to direct folks to his
>website
>
>i don't think simple announcements and product recommendations are
>necessarily inappropriate, but the poster really needs to be somewhat
>aware of 'community standards', and is certainly more respected if
>he/she has a history of contributing to the core reason for the
>group's existence

I think there is a line to be drawn between an announcement

   Database Blaster v2.5, the premier enterprise-ready middleware    object-oriented database library has been released!

and

   dbblaster-2.5 is out; this release fixes a bug when used with 'group    by' and adds preliminary support for Informix.

One is marketing spam, the other is a genuinely useful announcement (provided the program mentioned is relevant to the newsgroup) and perhaps a starting point for further discussion.

It may be difficult to draw a neat line between the two, but I don't think 'thin end of the wedge' arguments are enough to condemn as a spammer anyone who posts noncommercial software announcements, nor to try to forbid posts which are ontopic according to the charter of the group.

Further, attributing hidden motives to people (they only want to draw traffic to their site - the announcement is only a cover for some paid service they want to hike) isn't a good way to judge the usefulness of articles they post. Judge each article according to its content and whether it is ontopic for the group, which in this case is intended for talking about Oracle but excluding commercial announcements.

-- 
Ed Avis <ed_at_membled.com>