I have no affiliation with the author or the book and the post doesn’t contain any affiliate links. I consider the book a charitable effort since the author likely spent more time writing it than she will ever earn on Pragmatic Bookshelf.
Humm… “since it appears to be an advertisement, and mostly unrelated to Nix” — I think that even something that might be mostly unrelated to Nix can be posted there and as this book could be useful to other interested people, I don’t think it’s spam.
I don’t understand though, why @atemu, @aanderse think that this should be considered as spam, I am surprised, because you too, same as the authour participating in the community, give support to community members on the forum. Why do not just skip it if you are not interested as it seems to be healthier choice? @ehmry, with the appreciation of your opinion, however, well, next time no emojis in subject or no posts recommending books? And the mailing list assumes tons of messages?
It’s not as simple as skipping over it. I have mailing list mode enabled and this means I get a tacky looking spam email with an emojii subject line in my inbox.
I would have it put under spam if it was some generic advertisement from the publisher, but this seems more of a review. There is a significant overlap between the Haskell community and Nix and the book itself also seemed to some extend mention the nixpkgs integration aspect.
Just because most advertisement is spam does not mean that all advertisement is spam. (Also, I don’t think that we have control over the text Discourse put in here, but if we have we should probably reword it.) For example, our job market section basically contains 100% ads per design. Similarly for the Announcements section. Personally, I think that ads in the Links category can be fine if disclosed as such and the overall volume remains low. But as others stated, whether that post is an ad in the first place is disputable.
I think I’m safe in assuming your responses are from the stance of the NixOS Discourse moderators (as opposed to just your personal opinions)?
I would have it put under spam if it was some generic advertisement from the publisher, but this seems more of a review. There is a significant overlap between the Haskell community and Nix and the book itself also seemed to some extend mention the nixpkgs integration aspect.
I think that ads in the Links category can be fine if disclosed as such and the overall volume remains low. But as others stated, whether that post is an ad in the first place is disputable.
So the “official” stance from the moderators is that:
Advertisements with only a small, tangential relation to Nix are mostly okay, as long as they are in the Links section, and they are identifiable as ads?
There is definitely some leeway as to whether a post would be considered an advertisement or a review in the posters favor.
I’ll try to keep these things in mind when flagging in the future!
Most posts we declare as spam looks pretty much the same as what you will receive in your email inbox, while this review is likely more genuine than most Amazon reviews these days.
I would probably also take the volume into account. If someone starts posting large amount of links, we would also ask them to stop.
