2

Hadn't seen a discussion on this yet so wanted to start one off

Wordoor have setup 2 account now on this stack exchange wordoor & TaraWordoor now my problem with it is unlike other companies who have jumped onto the SE bandwagon like How to geek, Wordoor is a paid for service, don't provide back links to SE like HTG does and have blatantly tried to advertise services as answers

You should try to join the Wordoor community. It is great for language exchange and have great lessons (yes i am a teacher there) ;) try go to http://wordoor.com and check it out!

-Source

How does the community feel about companies using this stack exchange to advertise their services?

2
  • Further to my answer below, I've reviewed all of the answers from both accounts and this is the first time they've tried to advertise. I will keep an eye out, but hopefully that was a one off.
    – going
    Nov 17, 2013 at 23:35
  • 1
    Humans would view it as a form of negative advertising considering the quality of the answers. Search engines would not even bother upon seeing the nofollow tag in the link.
    – 杨以轩
    Nov 18, 2013 at 3:24

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
4

Just to add to Alenanno's answer, I went and asked members of the Stack Exchange business about this problem and they said people providing links to their own site are acceptable if the quality in the answers is provided (meaning you don't need to go to the external site to get the full answer).

So it is fine for a company to have an account on here and it is OK for them to link to their own site as long as there is a valid reason to do so and the answer actually answers the question. The SE team have said it is also OK to use your avatar image to advertise a company.

I would add further to that to say that we wouldn't allow a link if the link takes someone to a place where there isn't any supplementary content. Not just a "You should go to this site to learn some great things".

Flag as necessary.

3

Maybe you didn't see discussions but this is something that already has been discussed upon, on various sites. If something is consistently and constantly redirecting towards external services without providing an exhausting answer here first, then it's not an answer. Sometimes you might see link-only answers and not promotional answers, in any case they're both frowned upon. Flag them appropriately or using the custom reason if nothing is available and moderators will check it out.

Multiple accounts are not a problem by the way, you can have as many as you want, except when those accounts interact. As in, they vote for each other. That's not allowed.

3

Actually, this is covered on our help pages.

Avoid overt self-promotion.

The community tends to vote down overt self-promotion and flag it as spam. Post good, relevant answers, and if some (but not all) happen to be about your product or website, that’s okay. However, you must disclose your affiliation in your answers.

If a large percentage of your posts include a mention of your product or website, you're probably here for the wrong reasons. Our advertising rates are quite reasonable; contact our ad sales team for details. We also offer free community promotion ads for open source projects and non-profit organizations.

As others have said, feel free to comment on any post that you think doesn't follow these guidelines, flag it for the moderators to look at, or ask a question like this one on meta.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .