self-link

September 9, 2009 8:25 AM

This is a good post and subsequent discussion in many ways; but it seems to be a pretty clear violation of the self-linking prohibition in the FAQ: "It's against the rules to link to ... a site that you host or contribute to substantially".

Maybe it's a different Chris Hall though?

(penguinliz pointed all this out in the thread.)
posted by ericost to Etiquette/Policy at 8:25 AM (41 comments total)

"Yeah I saw that. I'm thinking we may go the "leave the thread but have a 'come to jesus' talk with the poster" route. As near as I can tell he didn't write it, it's on a site he writes for, I'm not sure how close the link is, but there are a few other links to his post and people seem to be okay in the thread otherwise. So it's not in SEO Douchebag territory so we might be able to salvage the user's relationship with the site and just put him on a short leash."

That's from the email I wrote back to you, did you get it? Basically the self-link and friend-link rules are there to keep the site from filling up with shitty promotions of stuff that wouldn't otherwise be decent stuff for MeFi. By the time we all had looked at that thread, it seemed to have some decent discussion going on, the post was about more than just the [admittedly sketchy] link to CarnalNation and we felt weird about just baleeting it. We've got a watchlist we can put folks on to make sure that if they post one iffy link they basically never get away with posting another and that's what I think we were planning to do this time unless the community had other ideas.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:31 AM on September 9, 2009

Sel-link; flogged.
posted by yhbc at 8:34 AM on September 9, 2009

So you're putting him on a short leash? Excellent! Is the collar studded?
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 8:35 AM on September 9, 2009

That's a good explanation.

You can close this thread if you want. Sorry! I didn't see your email response (it got spam filtered, and I did not see it in mefi mail, because I hardly ever use that, oops.)
posted by ericost at 8:36 AM on September 9, 2009

Oh, and now I see your response is not in fact in my mefi mail; The "1 new" up there in the header is my "Success! Your MetaTalk Post is Live" confirmation. What a newb.
posted by ericost at 8:40 AM on September 9, 2009

O! how I love the word baleet: deeply, unquantifiably, infinitely. It is as though somehow a single word survived the tower of Babel, uncorrupted and untarnished, to the present day. It creates a little pocket of sweetness and light wherever it appears -- a glimpse of the divine. To pronounce it is to emit photons from the vocal cords. Baleet, baleets, baleeting, baleeted.
posted by sleevener at 8:49 AM on September 9, 2009 [5 favorites]

You know baleet comes from a strongbad email, right?
posted by frecklefaerie at 9:10 AM on September 9, 2009

Ooh! transcript!
posted by frecklefaerie at 9:12 AM on September 9, 2009

Del Taco?
posted by Metroid Baby at 9:19 AM on September 9, 2009

Someone, somewhere, sometime, wrote a long and romantic definition of what happens when a man and woman fall in love, that ended with the words "and then he puts his peepee into her bugina." Can anyone remember who, where and when?

(I mention it only because the words baleeted and bugina seem to occupy the same shelf in the dusty lolbrary of my mind.)
posted by Jofus at 9:30 AM on September 9, 2009

♥lolbrary♥
posted by sleevener at 9:32 AM on September 9, 2009 [9 favorites]

MetaFilter: the dusty lolbrary of my mind
posted by DU at 9:35 AM on September 9, 2009 [1 favorite]

frecklefaerie, I first heard it from strongbad also, but I am also convinced that the word exists outside of time and humanity, reverberating through and beyond the fabric of the cosmos. But yes, good on you for due credit to the homestarrunner folks.
posted by sleevener at 9:37 AM on September 9, 2009

Homestarrunner is the source Baleeted *and* Asplode, if I'm remembering things correctly.
posted by Jofus at 9:45 AM on September 9, 2009

Are they still doing Strongbad emails? It seemed like for a time it was the greatest thing on the internet and the Brothers Chap were headed for fame and glory (or at least a tv show on the Cartoon Network), and then they just kind of petered out.
posted by empath at 9:46 AM on September 9, 2009

Homestarrunner is the source Baleeted *and* Asplode, if I'm remembering things correctly.

You are.
posted by empath at 9:46 AM on September 9, 2009

baleeted

I learned it from cortex, thinking it was a family word or somethingorother. This is how language evolves.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 9:49 AM on September 9, 2009 [2 favorites]

I also add all those "citation needed" carats to wikipedia.

Remember thine history!
posted by frecklefaerie at 9:51 AM on September 9, 2009

Baleeted is a good word. It seems like it should be a portmanteau of banned+deleted. Is it?
posted by FishBike at 10:01 AM on September 9, 2009

No, it was just homestar runner talking funny.
posted by empath at 10:30 AM on September 9, 2009

I personally would love a shirt that said something like

(front:)
METAFILTER CABAL
official member

(back:)
[there is no cabal]
posted by shakespeherian at 11:01 AM on September 9, 2009

Wow how did I get in this thread? Please kill this and me, while you're at it.
posted by shakespeherian at 11:02 AM on September 9, 2009

BLAM!
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:31 AM on September 9, 2009

Cleanup on aisle 6.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:32 AM on September 9, 2009 [1 favorite]

So here's a question about that. I am not a big one for the FPP, but does the policy mean that I can't, say, FPP something someone else wrote in , frex, Publishers Weekly or HuffPo, even though I am the lowliest freelance drone that ever freelanced and clearly have never met 99.9% of the other people who write for them? Or is it just that you can't link to something where you're on the masthead?
posted by Sidhedevil at 11:40 AM on September 9, 2009

Or is it just that you can't link to something where you're on the masthead?

The basic policy is that your post needs to pretty much pass the "smell test" of not looking like a self-link and this is because we don't want to have to fish around and see just how related you are to the site in question to see if you're SEO/spamming us and/or because you'll be too close to the subject to be able to determine if something is good for MeFi. This is a bigger deal with smaller or newer sites, less of an issue with bigger sites. It's especially fishy-seeming for a brand new user to link to something that's not very well established (YouTube videos with 100 views) and/or otherwise pretty anonymous (Tumblr blogs with no personal info). So, to elaborate

- your name on the domain registration, no.
- your name on the masthead, no.
- you wrote something for them once but everyone on the site is a friend of yours, no.
- you wrote something that is currently on the front page of the site but you linked to a different article, no.
- you work for the company that does promotion and/or marketing for the site, even if it's not your account, no.
- you get any financial kickback from linking to the site, no
- you are related to someone who works on the site and the site isn't a standard biggish site [like Publisher's Weekly], no.
- you know the people who put it together but it's a niche community where everyone knows each other anyhow, probably okay.
- you run the servers for the site but don't know the creative team at all, probably okay.

If you're ever even a little unsure, feel free to ask us. We're happy to vet a link for anyone and we can do it quicklike over chat.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 11:48 AM on September 9, 2009 [3 favorites]

There's no way that asplode is from Homestar Runner. Sadly, I have no sources.
posted by ODiV at 12:07 PM on September 9, 2009

it definitely is.

Find a source earlier than this.
posted by empath at 12:12 PM on September 9, 2009

How am I supposed to know how old that is?
posted by ODiV at 12:48 PM on September 9, 2009

Everyone knows how old that is.
posted by owtytrof at 12:57 PM on September 9, 2009 [1 favorite]

How am I supposed to know how old that is?

By relying on the fact that if something has enough fans, there will be exhaustive information on all aspects of it somewhere on the internet.
posted by advil at 1:16 PM on September 9, 2009

So 2004? Unfortunately, I suck at trying to search for anything date sensitive on the Internet. I'll agree that asplode is currently popular because of and most likely independently created by Homestar Runner, which is probably what was initially meant anyway.
posted by ODiV at 1:37 PM on September 9, 2009

- you run the servers for the site but don't know the creative team at all, probably okay.

I don't know much about servers and whatnot, but it seems to this layman that making an FPP out of a site hosted on my servers might be a rather effective way to bump that site's traffic into pays-me-a-heckuva-lot-more territory. If that's how things actually work, it's a bit of a conflict of interest.
posted by Sys Rq at 3:18 PM on September 9, 2009

Also, Letterman used to use the word asplode from time to time. That's where I got it, anyway.
posted by Sys Rq at 3:20 PM on September 9, 2009

What if the hitcount of the linked page is used by a serial killer, once it hits a certain number he kills the woman he kidnapped? But I don't know him, or his creative team or anything like that?

BUT I'm indirectly involved because the woman he kidnapped is my mother in law?
posted by floam at 4:05 PM on September 9, 2009

I don't know what the answer to your question is, floam, but I want to option the movie rights NOW.
posted by Sidhedevil at 4:19 PM on September 9, 2009

making an FPP out of a site hosted on my servers might be a rather effective way to bump that site's traffic into pays-me-a-heckuva-lot-more territory

Please see the sixth item listed, in that case.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 4:25 PM on September 9, 2009

I don't know what the answer to your question is, floam, but I want to option the movie rights NOW.

FYI, I think I may have seen that on Law & Order: SVU a couple dozen times.
posted by Sys Rq at 4:58 PM on September 9, 2009

Someone, somewhere, sometime, wrote a long and romantic definition of what happens when a man and woman fall in love...

ob: "For years Stephanie had been yearning for a real man to take her. To make her realize the awesome potential of her femininity."

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
posted by Pronoiac at 8:43 PM on September 9, 2009

Pronoiac, thanks to your finding and linking that, I had the pleasure of giving it its 69's favorite. Right in the hooha.
posted by davejay at 11:11 PM on September 10, 2009

69th. bluh.
posted by davejay at 11:11 PM on September 10, 2009