[MUD-Dev] Re: ADMIN: Advertising on MUD-Dev

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 02:22 PM 8/9/98 -0400, I personally witnessed s001gmu at nova.wright.edu
jumping up to say:
>
>Besides, I don't see how a mail service provided advert is any different
>from various ppl's sigs that advertise their particular web page/mud/
>whatever.  Ban one, ya gotta ban 'em all.

To play devil's advocate for a moment (although I agree with the sentiment
of this post), .sig blocks have been subject to a lot of etiquette rules
for a long time. When someone writes a .sig block, they have some idea of
who they're corresponding with. When you append an ad to someone's e-mail,
you have no idea where it's going or whether the ad is appropriate for that
forum. 

And on the other end... you have to consider that these freemail services
support themselves by selling advertising. If we deliberately subvert or
bypass that revenue source, in whatever fashion, the value of that
advertising will drop and eventually they will be forced to either take
countermeasures or shut down. While one list certainly won't make or break
the provider, it does set a dangerous precedent. If we serve as an example
for others, and I think to at least some extent we do, we may end up
creating a problem in the eyes of the advertisers -- and they'll have to do
something about it.

A lot of lists and newsgroups have grappled with the idea that some people
who have URLs in their signatures are engaged in profit-oriented
activities; while they don't mind Bob's home page in his signature, they
often have a problem with advertising and somehow have to reconcile that
Joe is a small business owner and his home page is basically the online
presence for Joe's Web Design. Likewise, while we wouldn't be terribly
happy if Bill posted a message to the list advertising his graphics CD-ROM
collection, if John posts a message relevant to the forum through Bill's
free e-mail service and Bill sticks a few lines about his CDs on there --
well, somehow we have to decide whether the ad is offensive enough to
discard the content (There's some phrase about babies and bathwater in
colloquial English, isn't there?), or at least to spend time and effort
developing an ad-remover for posts. 

I think the latter will just end up gaining wider acceptance, and then
result in a sort of war between advertisers and list managers where no one
wins at all. If you attack the service provider's revenue source, the
provider is going to begin getting VERY creative about how to protect it.
And since that provider probably has more people spending more time on the
matter than you do... guess who ends up winning? Not to mention it's a
grudge match, and there's going to be a lot of injury on both sides. Who
suffers most? List members and users of the service. 

On the filtering subject... personally, I think it's reasonable from both
standpoints to take the ads out of the archives. There was, in the past, a
de facto standard which said "three dashes in a row before and after the
main body of the message to separate irrelevant content". Basically,
<CR>---[-[...]]<CR> meant "this is a boundary". Most list processors still
use this to determine when a command sequence ends, to separate the .sig
block. I've seen very few ads from these freemail services, but I seem to
recall they used the dash standard when I did see them.

---
=+[ caliban at darklock.com ]=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=[ http://www.darklock.com/ ]+=
"It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more 
doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a 
new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by 
the preservation of the old institution, and merely lukewarm defenders in 
those who would gain by the new one."              -- Niccolo Machiavelli
=+=+[ FREE KEVIN * http://www.kevinmitnick.com/ * IT COULD BE YOU ]+=+=+=