I am active in multiple FLOSS communities. In most of them, there is a rule prohibiting posting advertisements of proprietary products in their fora. Given recent events, am I right to assume that this is not a problem and even / or welcome here?
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I am just a community member same as you, but in my years of being active here I don't recall seeing any proprietary libs or apps being advertised on these forums.
And truth be told, I'm kind of thankful for that.
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I'm just a regular user here and have no idea about the rules re: advertising. I can only say that in the swamp of advertising that is the internet today this forum is tiny corner of advertising free tranquility that I would rather not see violated.
Having said that, the occasional mention of commercial tools and products in passing does happen, that's OK.
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Is this about Rustroid? The topic was unlisted and is now listed again. What I could find in the ToS on advertisements of proprietary products (I believe) is this (my emphasis):
the Content is not spam, is not machine- or randomly-generated, and does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites, or to further unlawful acts (such as phishing) or mislead recipients as to the source of the material (such as spoofing);
The word "unwanted" kind of lets room for interpretation on whether proprietary projects can be advertised or not, I guess (if commercial content covers ads for proprietary products, which in my interpretation it does). The Rustroid topic is IMO easily ignored and has seen positive response from someone on the leadership council. So I wouldn't consider it unwanted. But I do agree with the others who already posted their opinions. I wouldn't want to read topics that are advertisements of proprietary dev-tools or SaaS apps more frequently than I have over the past few years I have been active here.
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For what it’s worth, for the Arduino forum we created a Products and Services section for on-topic advertising. That’s worked well.
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On this users forum, the default view is a chronological view of all the topics. This means that such a section wouldn't be hidden away. This in contrast to OpenWRT, Home Assistent and some other discourse forum I also use. There the top view is a list of subforums. So it is easy to avoid the things you are not interested in.
Basically their default view corresponds to Categories - The Rust Programming Language Forum
I don't see a way to filter out specific categories on the timeline view, which is a bummer.
On the bottom of https://users.rust-lang.org/my/preferences/tracking, muting a category should remove it from the “timeline view” aka the “Latest” page. Sounds like also from the list of all categories, so you’d only see it if you navigate to the link directly(?) – I haven’t actually tested the setting myself yet.
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Personally I'd read that as if you're a person making one post about a new product, or a new feature in a product, and the rate of such posts is not particularly abusive, and that you think is relevant to the community here, then it's completely acceptable, though I'd expect it wouldn't get terribly much traffic unless it's something really out there just due to the general personality of developers!
In short, so long as it's less Advertising™ and more - I think "community evangelizing" is still the current corporate speech?
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