Is posting links to commercial content as part of a resource post allowed?
I'm currently working on the Ancient Greek resources page. There are several textbooks I've used and found useful, as well as various other resources that are not open source. What should our policy be for these kind of recommendations; just a name? An Amazon link is okay? Limit to free resources only?
Obviously we don't want to end up with spammy advertising, but sometimes just giving someone a link is what they need.
2 answers
You should probably refer to the promotional content guidelines.
Reproduced here:
You must explicitly state your affiliation. If you're linking your dragon-riding place, please just include a disclaimer that clearly states how you're connected with it. Something as simple as "This place is run by my half-brother Gronk, and I work there" is perfectly fine.
Please don't include promotional content when it's not necessary. If it's not necessary for your post, then just leave it out. If you're answering a question about gnomes in the garden, your dragon-riding business isn't relevant no matter how well your half-brother Gronk keeps the gnomes out. Keep your answer focused, and don't include self-promotion when it isn't relevant.
Your posts should not be limited to only the promotional content. If every single post that you write is about your dragon-riding business, you're probably doing something wrong. While a few links or mentions here and there is fine in moderation, if that's all you ever post about you should probably think about why you're posting here in the first place. (Hint: If it's just to self-promote, that's a bad sign.)
If you're posting a genuinely useful resource, and you make sure to state your affiliation to it (if any), then you should be good to go!
Speaking personally (I haven't consulted anybody else on the team), I don't see why this would be a problem so long as there's nothing sneaky or sketchy going on. Not all resources are freely available online; if a book is relevant, I think a link is more helpful than just a citation.
Amazon might be trying to take over the world, but there's a reason people link to them a lot: their catalog is large. If you find a book somewhere else, that should be fine too; we don't have preferred vendors.
I think there are a couple things we should be careful of:
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Self-promotion: I think this is fine; if the person who literally wrote the book on a topic shows up here, why wouldn't we welcome that person's contributions? But I think we should ask people to disclose affiliations that could appear to be conflicts of interest, even if they aren't actually. It doesn't need to be anything fancy -- "my book" or "(I work for this company)" or the like tells people what they need to know to evaluate the material.
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Link shorteners/obfuscators: please don't. People should be able to tell where a link is going to take them before clicking.
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Don't be spammy: if you're adding a link even though its presence doesn't make the post better, you should probably leave it out.
Again, these are my personal suggestions, intended as a starting point for the conversation. What do the rest of you think?
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