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I work with bricks daily and I wouldn't mind of future bricks visitors associated my, presumably, totally awesome questions and answers with my company. Since SE doesn't have such a thing as a signature block, I think it might be worth while to establish, early in our coming-out process, our community's relevant tolerance for people pushing either their commercial or non-commercial sites.

It feels to me like this has probably been hashed out somewhere else, but what counts is what we want in our community. I know, for example, Joel S. recently talked about this on a recent SE podcast.

I personally feel that "casual links are ok, but don't be annoying about it" is a good-enough guideline.

There is a tension, in that we obviously don't want the site to be spammy, but also, we don't want to exclude the people that are literally professionals, either. The people that are expert enough to have their own site will always have a need or desire to associate their awesome answer back to their site. If they can't link back, then they are driving traffic away from their own site towards bricks.stackexchange.com. We don't people to have make that choice.

Here is a concrete example:

I recently asked this: LEGO Safety: Known risks and how to avoid them? I had already started writing a blog post on my website (Ascendly.com) on this topic and wanted to take advantage of bricks.se.com to make my post even better. It is my intention to link to the SE question in my post, and add link in my question back to my post. How would you react to such a link?

How did you feel that I inserted that link to my site in the above paragraph?

How would you react if somebody specifically mentions the they work with company X, or if they are a builder-for-hire?

2 Answers 2

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If you you have some relationship to a product, website, or company that you mention in your post, that relationship must be fully disclosed in your post.

But be careful. If a substantial proportion of your posts seem to exist only to promote your product or website, that will not be tolerated. The community frowns on overt self-promotion and tends to vote it down and flag it as spam. Post good, relevant answers, and if some small portion of them happen to be about your product or website, so be it. However, you must disclose your affiliation in your answers.

If a large percentage of your posts include a mention of your product or website, you're probably here for the wrong reasons.

If you can stay within the above guidelines, and offer questions and answers of genuine benefit to the community which happen to mention your affiliation or product in context — and with full disclosure — then your contributions are welcome.

5

There are a number of elements to this:

Signature Blocks: Nope, these are quite clearly frowned upon, but you can add links to your profile - in fact, if you do, they get picked up in the "Expanding user cards", which act as a signature:
Viewing my user card

You can see more details here:

Links from Bricks.SE: In general, it's frowned upon to answer with just "read my blog post on this here" - ideally, you would also summarise the post in the answer so that if the blog were to disappear, the bulk of the information would still exist here.

Content from Bricks.SE: All content on the StackExchange network is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, meaning you are free to reuse the content provided that:

  1. Attribution: You say it came from bricks.se, and link directly back to the original question following Jeff's rules about that
  2. Share-Alike: You release your modifications of the content under the same license as this.

Links to Bricks.SE: As stated above, if you use content from here, you should link back to it, so links in are fine - indeed, once we're out of private beta, the Share links will be enabled and actively encouraged:
Share links on questions

These were disabled while we were in private beta because unless you're in the beta you couldn't get in - see the comments to this question about Private Beta accounts not appearing on the account tab for more thoughts on linking to "brick walls".

There's even a couple of badges for high referrers:

  • Announcer: Shared a link to a question that was visited by 25 unique IP addresses
  • Booster: Shared a link to a question that was visited by 300 unique IP addresses
  • Publicist: Shared a link to a question that was visited by 1000 unique IP addresses

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