tbstone's avatar

[beset7]

Site isn't up yet. I PM'd him asking if it was going to have commercial banners and he was a little defensive. Somebody who knows him want to talk to him?

edit: He pm'd me back and didn't realize I was a mod when he was defensive. He said that he originally planned on not having any advertising as it's just a free service he wishes to provide to the 2p2 community. But, he's having problems with his web service provider and is considering having ads to pay for a better ISP and other costs.

[Surfbullet]

right now it's a free service he's hosting(albeit crappy one since he keeps exceeding his bandwidth allocations and then dl's stop) for players to upload videos for 2+2.

There are no ads there now, so I see nothing wrong with his avatar, since he doesn't stand to profit / compete with 2+2. If he puts up competing ad banners then I'd guess we have to tell him to take his avatar down?

Surf

[beset7]

Ahh. Ok. My PMs with him let me to believe he hadn't put the site up yet but that when he did it might or might not have a commercial element to it. If it's been up and running ad-free then seems fine with me.

[B Dids]

TStone's doing this free and despite some urging seems to be thinking about paying for it out of pocket (I suggested he solicit donations if bandwidth gets high).

I think part of the reason for his avatar is that based on a thread in here, but Commodus and myself told him that we couldn't put his site in his title or loc.

[beset7]

I think it's pretty gray area. If he generates a lot of traffic thanks to his avatar and then decides to commercialize the site...

But it sounds OK to me at this point but a consistent no url's in your avatar might be better.

[Greg J]

If/when he decides to commercialize the site with ads then I'm sure he will voluntarily take down the avatar (though a mod should certainly prompt him). He seems to be a pretty reasonable guy.

[Lloyd]

I cannot imagine that with URLs not allowed in locations that they are allowed in avatars. And that rule was not just for URLs that were commercial but any URL. I believe allowing this is contrary to current policy.

[beset7]

[ QUOTE ]
If/when he decides to commercialize the site with ads then I'm sure he will voluntarily take down the avatar (though a mod should certainly prompt him). He seems to be a pretty reasonable guy.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah. He told me that he had no gripes with taking it down if we felt it was improper. That's a great point about the LOC field. I can't put the URL for my blog in my loc field but I could stencil it on my avatar? (mine has banners but just assuming it didn't).

[Surfbullet]

[ QUOTE ]
I cannot imagine that with URLs not allowed in locations that they are allowed in avatars. And that rule was not just for URLs that were commercial but any URL. I believe allowing this is contrary to current policy.

[/ QUOTE ]

I didn't realize that there was a blanked "no urls in locations" rule. I'll keep an eye out and start enforcing that, I thought it was a "no commercial urls and the rest is to the discretion of the mod."

Surf

[beset7]

The latest on URL in loc