gold coin biting poster removed by ECG

[Martini_Enfield]

@Fenris

All good points, but he didn’t jump through stupid hoops (“ask permission”? To post a freakin’ cite about an obscure topic?) and he doesn’t know who Cecil is* and isn’t part of a community that died around whenever the Idiots-In-Charge decided to kill the community with Pay-To-Post, so clearly he’s a spammer for posting a message that he can’t possibly benefit from. :rolleyes:

*Who stopped writing books around 2000 or so and hasn’t posted here since 2013. He’s a HUGE part of the SDMB. :rolleyes: .

Exactly. As someone noted above, it’s Wikipedia-level silliness.

[Irishman]

@TubaDiva

It’s complete and total spam. It really really is spam and has nothing to do with the board or the community at all.

Except, of course, it was directly on topic for the thread in question.

Note that the people who do this are always Guests and never Members. Because if they were Members of the community they know they could just ask up about it, get permission, and go forward. But no, they have to sneak their business in through the back door. They’re spammers.

You are correct that he was not a long time participant on the boards, he found a thread on a specific topic of interest to him, probably by google, and revived an ancient thread to provide an update. However, none of that makes him a spammer. While those are traits shown by many spammers, they are also traits shared by a number of people who go on to become regular participants.

Sometimes they don’t even bother to sign up as Guests. I have seen email that references something on the board – usually it says something like "I saw this on your board and … " (cites old post that most often is of ancient vintage that only could have been found through a Google search) and in the guise of “giving you an update” or “answering the question” they say “I have written a blog post/scholarly paper/entire encyclopedia on this topic and hey wouldn’t it be a good idea if you update your site to include this link?” They’re so lazy and disinterested in the community that they can’t even sign up!

Other times they offered to write “guest posts” … or worse, “guest columns.” This shows such a massive ignorance of this site and how it operates that I don’t know what kept my eyeballs from rolling all the way back in my head.

Great, but none of this applies to this poster. He did not send an email, he made a post. He did not ask us to update a column to provide a link, nor did he offer to write guest columns. He simply posted a link to a free scholarly article.

Even if it’s entertaining, this person wants to use the views on the board for their own benefit and nothing more.

And that benefit is… getting people to be aware of his free scholarly paper on a site that does not pay article contributors by view? I’m really scratching my head here.

They’re not interested in joining the community or sustaining it except as it suits their own ends. They don’t know Cecil and they don’t know you. F’ em. They’re spammers.

While that is true of spammers, you cannot say that is true about a guy who just joined and was immediately banned before he could establish any interest in the site as a whole.

Just saying.

Just saying.

@Corner_Case

The person joined, pretended to be other-than-the-author, and posted a link to his/her research paper.

I don’t see him pretending to not be the author. He doesn’t directly claim the work as his, but he doesn’t deny it, either.

If he/she was proud of the paper then announce authorship. I can’t imagine that getting this far you are too shy to just say you are the author, unless your goal was something else.

Maybe he was afraid if he posted he was the author, he would be accused of spamming.

*Some of you certainly seem to like recreational outrage. *

You’re participating in the thread, too.

[engineer_comp_geek]

Moderator Action

I would like to point out that the actual moderation issue was solved back at post #26. At this point, this thread has devolved into a silly argument over the definition of spam. Since everyone is just making the same arguments over and over (i.e. it is spam because it was posted solely for self-promotion, it isn’t spam because it was on topic, etc), I can’t see any possible resolution to this. Rather than let this go around and around with the same arguments repeate forever, I think we’re done here.

Thread closed.

If you have a compelling reason for me to re-open it, send me a PM and I’ll consider it.