You can ban me for what you deem as 'commercial content' and move my posts to other forums all you want, but the only people you are hurting are the people who need information and now cannot find it.
With all due respect, this seems like a good opportunity to remind visitors and members alike of exactly WHY we have the forum-spam/link-related rules that we do around here.
If site administration allows multiple SELF-promotional links to a single organization...
then we pretty much have chosen to allow any person to post any number of links to pretty much any web address.
Following along with that logic, it becomes open season on link farming. Anything less is favortism toward SOME blogs/companies over others, and this community has repeatedly expressed that it values the egalitarian outlook of NOT offering such favortism to particular site sponsors or advertisers. We aren't treating Maya in any specially abusive manner-- and with, what, ten posts in 12 hours, SEVEN OF THEM directing trafffic to the poster's Blog? Hm. Sorry, but that doesn't seem "participatory" so much as "predatory," as in "designed to drive click-throughs to that blog." This is particularly true in those instances in which VERY OLD THREADS are bumped with such posts.
That impacts our page rank on search engines, because the large-name search engines have built in routines intended to DEFEAT listings that appear to be link farming.
In other words, link-spam makes it paradoxically HARDER for this site to appear in searches using search engines the more outbound links we permit to any individual site.Why are we serious about our site integrity with respect to
link-farming practices aimed at SEO?
BECAUSE THEY HURT PEOPLE WHO ARE LOOKING FOR HELP and make it harder for them to find us.That's all. I know that it seems harmless. But comparable communities (such as KFA) allow
no such links. None. We allow ONE self-promotional link to a personal commercial site/blog. That's
generous by industry standards, as it were.
Hope that explains why we take this kind of thing so seriously.