A few weeks ago someone decided to ban posts here from a very friendly developer who made the mistake (in some eyes) of using his first post to ask for ideas for his reboot of VooDooPad, which he calls Mojopad. (Not my favorite name, but you do what you do.)
I bought the app because I liked VooDooPad before Primate squashed it. I really like MojoPad. It has all the features plus more.
More and more because the developer has pounded out meaningful updates to the software almost daily, so that it has grown in a short time way beyond what VooDooPad was to become its own vision for a PKM / Graph / Local AI tool, plus super-fast publishing to HTML for your own use.
Luckily, the dev left here and found a thoughtful, supportive community to feed ideas and suggestions, almost all of which he built already. That’s all he asked for here – until the grinch arrived.
It’s worth trialing the software, if only because sometimes the best times for new software are this phase when the indiie dev is going all out to express their ideas in a well-crafted new idea.
Maybe I’m splitting hairs, but it looked like people were engaging with him pretty well—and a perhaps very small number of people (maybe as low as one?) threw up flags too quickly.
Anyways, I hope some reasonable community guideline can be set. I’m all for getting rid of pure marketing/spam posts, but don’t want to drive away developers who want to engage. There’ve been a few other devs who post here and I always like that. It’s a net positive for the forums, I think.
Unless I missed something, I don’t recall any disrespectful posts, although things where flagged before I had a chance to read the posts. If the issue was someone flagging the devs posts, surely that is not the problem? I perceive the issue more to do with that we didn’t have enough moderators able to quickly resolve the issue.
Of course this still doesn’t solve the problem of when people join a forum and their first post is about their own software.
Maybe the mods can pull some strings and get a category created for devs promoting their apps. Then if people don’t want to see them, they can block them.
i fully endorse this idea and hope it can be implemented! i was about to post the same.
producthunt has a great model albeit complex, but something simple could be amazing!
I’m afraid I don’t agree. I’ve not seen any unfriendliness. People have flagged posts from new users who’s first post is promoting their own software which can be perceived as spam. One person’s spam is another person’s product. Until this is resolved this is bound to cause some friction.
