This. I don’t understand this thread.
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We do have product representatives here. For Ex DEVONthink. Very professional. Never promotes. But always directs to their own forum for support. Just gives enough information when asked. This is healthy.
Just take a look at MacStories even though it’s paywalled there is too much of chaos over there.
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and @Jezmund_Berserker They get flagged by the people who are on the forum around the time they’re posted and are either automatically or manually (by admins) removed (This is dependent on forum settings) so are then no longer visible.
I suspect I see them on my daily visit to because I’m in the UK and 5-8 hours ahead of many others here.
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I think a self-promotion category is the solution to this. In the MacSparky Labs Discord, there is a separate self-promotion category (which is not limited to people hawking their product or service), and it seems to work pretty well.
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How long will it be before one of the admin responses to this and puts this to rest?
In the meantime I’ll keep flagging posts I think are SPAM.
We’ll need to be patient. I suspect with Stephen leaving, the logistics of moderating this site are in a state of flux. That is my guess. 
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Thanks. I don’t particularly care all that much. It was asked more out of curiosity.
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My two cents as a indie developer who’s a long-time lurker of this forum: I’ve always abstained from mentioning my apps, even when maybe one of them could be helpful, because the last thing I’d want is to appear my intention is to spam.
I think it’s only fair, for a tight community like this one, to treat subscribe plus immediate promo post as basically spam; exception for relevant products can obviously be made, but honestly this place is better off when people organically recommend apps because they enjoy them, not because they made them.
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I’m not sure there is really a solution. Some like posts that promote software, some don’t. Creating a specific category isn’t really (IMO) going to stop that. The difficulty is you can’t allow some and not others.
It would be difficult to stop as people genuinely come to the forum looking for solutions and sometimes someone else posts some software that solves the problem. You can’t have posts talking about productivity without mentioning apps.
I suppose the posts I ignore or would cause me to frequent the forum less are when posts that are specifically about an individuals apps and when they’re updated or released, etc. But even then, how do you do this when you hit Black Friday and everyone is posting sales?
I cannot really see a solution here. Perhaps, being an active forum member could discourage fly by posters or limiting a poster’s self advertising to so many posts a month.
My preferred solution is to have only poster’s with good quality apps to post their wares 
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I think you should mention it with something like “full disclosure from a long time MPU forum Member. I create an app called XXXXX and it may help. YMMV. “
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Fair. I’d certainly do that if I posted more, but since I mostly read, I’ve kept this approach. If I’ll ever be more actively posting I’ll certainly be less timid 
It’s a whole new world with vibe coding and Molbot. Maybe we’ll all just be making our own apps. I don’t know where things are going.
With all due respect, there are a lot of options to allow some and some not. On Reddit we use specific posting guidelines and rules and just posts that follow the rules are allowed. It just makes sense. You couldn’t allow every post if this forum would be targeted by a ton of low effort posters. You wouldn’t see anything else anymore. It would be like Blackfriday but all the time.
It is but did you ever listen to AI music? It is like going outside one morning and everything is like it ever was but the sky is suddenly pink instead of blue. It is like cooking exactly following a recipe but missing one main ingredient. It’s like the perfect image of a cowboy riding into the sunset generated by AI and after looking at it for a longer time you notice that one hand has 6 fingers. It feels off. And vibe coded software also feels off. It feels like an episode of Black Mirror. You know that something bad is going on. You just don’t know what.
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This is the software forum. If you want to promote yer software, this seems to be the proper forum to do so…
… and have folks checked out the new Bundlehunt?
Seriously, though… perhaps instead of a “software promotions” forum (where the various threads we get for Black Friday/CyberMonday can all go reside), we have a town square forum where we can gab about anything NOT software related… no sense in making sub-sub-catagories of existing forums… IMHO
At the time of writing 124 clicks on the link I shared here:
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Did the admins ever comment or take any action regarding this?
Not that I’m aware. I’ll just flag anything I think is inappropriate.
Can we not just have one of our AI overlords monitor the forum and delete the bad posts. What could go wrong? 
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Oh boy! Looks like I better start being nicer to my AI!! 
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