Policies about commercial posts

Hi everyone,

We have a truly wonderful nonprofit community where people help each other not for commercial gain but because they know what it is like to suffer and want to help others avoid that suffering.

Communities such as ours are often the targets of spammers, so we have tough policies in place so that when newcomers arrive, they can see our true character as an independent nonprofit community. This helps us spread the word about TMS because when people find us on the internet they can see that we have scientific foundations and no hidden commercial interests.

An introduction to our policies can be found in our FAQ: "The forum is not for advertising. If your intent in making a post is to advertise, before you make a post you should get in touch with Forest to find out if the post is appropriate. In addition, excessive links in posts may be removed because all links in posts by non-staff members are "nofollowed" and cause PageRank to be destroyed. (In other words, excess off-site links hurt everyone.)"

About half an hour ago, we just had someone attempt to advertise on the forum who did not follow the instructions above to get my permission before posting. I'm proud to say that within 15 minutes, a diligent member of our forum had already flagged the post as spam using the "Report" link. I've gone ahead and deleted the post. (This doesn't mean that they can't submit their content - it just means that they still have to follow the rules.)

Note: the person this post is about is NOT pworby, who did everything she should have done. Chances are it's not anyone else you've ever heard of - I haven't heard of them and I have my ear pretty closely to the ground on these issues.

Having run this community for seven years now, I find that people who have conventional licenses to practice medicine or psychotherapy tend to exercise good judgment when making posts and interacting with me. Perhaps this is because their licensure requires them to take courses on ethics. However, while most people without conventional training and licensure are a pleasure to work with some of them just don't seem to understand.

If the person had followed my instructions, I would have let them make pretty much the same post. (I would have asked them to remove some of the painkiller names from the post as these can get us in trouble with Google.) In fact, if this person wants to go through the proper process, I'll still let them post.