Diaries For Commercial Purposes

I’ve become aware, through someone disputing the automatic spamstatus of their diary, that there’s an expectation from this site that business should be allowed to use the site for commercial reasons. Ironically, the reason the owner gave for disputing their spamstatus actually confirmed they would be using it to create spam… But I digress.
Here’s my policy. I have no objection to a business owner creating a diary to chronicle things that go on in their business or possibly even to keep their current customers up to date with what’s happening within their company. But I DO object to commercial signups solely intended to use our system to drive people to their own website, or affiliate links or revenue generating pages away from this site.
This site is a diary site. It is NOT a blog site. There is, in my opinion, a difference. If this site were a blog site, I wouldn’t be worried about commercial signups. But to me, this site replaces the original leather bound diary that people used to keep under their bed. It adds some community interaction which perhaps the leather bound diary doesn’t have. But a leather bound diary definitely does not have pages that are devoted to generating revenue for third parties.
So, commercial people – you may sign up if your intention is chronicle your company activities. You may NOT signup if you intend to use the pages to sell your wares.

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3 Comments

  1. I totally agree, DearDiary won’t be the same if polluted with commercial blogs canningly disquised as ordinary diaries. I would say, if we have to let them in, let have them mark their diary as “business” (or something). I think, there was similar system in the old DD – you can select what’s your diary is about or something like this. If in the list of updated diaries or on the comment’s author name there would be something to tell me it has commercial interests, I wouldn’t mind them being there, as long as they clearly identify themselves and readers only have to visit their sites if interested in their products. I’d say, that’s fair. For moderators – we can keep the right to mark the diary as a spam if it is an income generating, but not labeled as such. how about that?

    1. Personally I think your solution is too tolerant 🙂
      Though I did think of trying to get an overall ‘genre’ system like we had before, but decided against it instead preferring the genre per entry style that WP gives us by default….
      Having said that, a way to search across all diaries for entries of a particular genre might be nice. But it’ll require some significant database tweaks.

      1. well, the tolerance vs fairness, I’m generally a peaceful girl 😉 lol in my experience it is as harsh as any legal blocking. you give them what they ask on a condition they identify themselves. why would the spammer want to do so? and if they don’t, they can be legitimately deleted without warning on the basis “you’ve been warned when signed up” 😉 besides, there is always a blacklist option in diary settings, where each diarist can chose if they want to block diaries with the “genre label” of commercial site: dashboar–>Settings–>Discussion settings: Comment Blacklist
        BTW: Just checked out the Akissmet spam block plugin – looks awesome…if only there is a way to change the default colour of the box to transparent!!! (wink wink 😉 should I add this to enchancement requests into bugzilla?)

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