Commercial advertising.

[meow2222]

1. commerical ads in uk.d-i-y are spam, because they are unwelcome uninvited unwanted ads that first negatively affect the group, and if continued will destroy the group entirely, as they have numerous others.
2. define 'targeted', or to put it another way, how can ads seriously be 'targeted' when placed in ukdiy, which has readers and posters of a wide range of interests, jobs, businesses and so on. Bear in mind that what this group covers is by no means a single activity or single area of activities. It covers everything from architecture to construction to putting up shelves, from practical advice to legal to mediation, with posters covering the range from builders to trapeze artists, and more. If anything is 'targeted' here, it must be a very large target :)
3. What you say sounds like a standard spammmer delusion, ie the notion that >1% of the audience will have some kind of interest in their junk. IRL people mostly see through the sales bs and get totally peed off with it.
4. A lot of people, me included, do not buy from spammers. If one of my regular suppliers began spamming this place, I'd be searching for another company to do biz with.

If you want to sell something commercially, you're welcome to mention it in a sig line in genuine contributions. Otherwise hostility, criticism, sometimes derision, and the pointing of readers to better options all tend to result. If you look at spam here, you may notice that in the majority of cases anyone reading the resultant thread will be very much put off from buying the goods advertised.

This is because of 2 simple truths:

1. Good products dont need to be spam advertised, and normally arent.
2. Since spammed products are pretty much never the best option, all one need to do antispam is state the truth.

And there is nothing more effective in putting buyers off than stating the true facts, facts that the potential buyer recognises within themselves as true.

Finally, since the McLibel case, antispammers are living in a pretty fearless world, so hinting at defamation or making other related legal threats is simply not now effective at shutting people up.

Summary: if someone spams here, it will almost always turn out to be bad press for them. There is such a thing as bad exposure, and many here know how to deliver it. Thats why this newgroup continues to exist and function.

NT

[Dave Fawthrop]

|Chris Bacon wrote: |> [e-mail] wrote: | |> > Loads of newsgroups have died because they were so overflowed with spam |> > they were not worth the massive effort to find anything worth reading. |> > Only through vigilant anti-spam activity do newsgroups survive this |> > threat. | |> In what way is a targetted commercial post "spam"? | |1. commerical ads in uk.d-i-y are spam, because they are unwelcome |uninvited unwanted ads that first negatively affect the group, and if |continued will destroy the group entirely, as they have numerous |others.

Unfortunately not true. Commercial posts only officially become spam if they exceed a BI of 20.

posted here get nowhere near 20.

The only way to discourage commercial adverts would be to put it in the Charter which does not exist ATM. I conventional charter made from

with the clause against commercial advertising would IMO be non controversial in unnc.

[Douglas de Lacey]

A targeted commercial might indeed be welcome. By that I mean a reply to a particular question by a manufacturer who explains how his product can be used to solve the problem. We do occasionally get such contributions. Anything else isn't targeted in any meaningful sense. It may not be spam, but would be very undesirable.

Douglas de Lacey