I'm sorry I called out a user who self-linked

January 10, 2001 8:22 AM

http://www.metafilter.com/comments.mefi/5157

I ended up getting some slack on my comment toward Noah Grey for his self-linking within the referred mefi thread. I apologize if I stepped out of bounds in calling Noah on his self-linking. mathowie, I think you do need to make guidelines in self-linking (as well as members policing metafilter) a bit more clear. I had previously thought that self-linking is a offense all around while I guess it was just limited to the main page logging.

Again, apologies.
posted by rlef98 to Etiquette/Policy at 8:22 AM (1 comment total)

No big deal, it's not clear in the guidelines. Self-linking on the main page is the problem, because that is where most of the traffic is. Within threads, people can say "well here's what I thought of that (link to their own rant on the subject, hosted on their site)" or "I made something similar here (link to their site)." If someone just self-linked in a comment on every thread, they'd lose all credibility and I'd probably boot them. But it's fine to do it once in a while.

The reason the rule exists is so MetaFilter doesn't get appropriated as everyone's guestbook. If it was let go, every day would have a post saying "I wrote this rant about foo, what do you guys think?" If you look back in the archives from Summer 1999, you can see someone doing that quite often. There wasn't much content back then, so I let it go, but these days, it would be a real problem.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:49 PM on January 10, 2001