From: Valmi Dufour
To: HC volunteers checkers

Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 23:17:58 -0200
Topic: The 'website reference' problem


Hello all,

I noticed today that we have a little problem: it seems that some
checkers misunderstood a decision that was only supposed to affect the
forum and started to approve messages referring to CS. The problem is
that some seem to be relunctant to start freezing those again.

So I'm sorry for bringing this painful discussion up again, but I
thought this politicy needed clarifications.

First of all I would like to remind you that spam checking and forum
moderation is very different. We have always been much more liberal in
the forum, allowing such things as visa invitation requests and
blatant website promotion. In fact if you ever looked at the messages
sent to spammers, they usually send them to the forum to spread their
spam. This is because forum messages are not intrusive, they are not
sent directly to members' email unless they requested it, and nobody
is obligated to read them.

Now with private messages we are much more careful, and we don't allow
any kind of website promotion, even if it appears in an otherwise
totally valid HC-related message. A website giving more information
about the member, etc., is as far as we'll allow.

But why, some ask, "Would you host me and oh, you can see my profile
on CS too" would be considered as website promotion? Well two things
here:

1) Maybe the user chose not to fill his HC profile and to use his CS
profile as a kind of personnal page, to give more information about
him. Some do this because they like CS's cute website design and/or
liberality, but do realise that CS just doesn't work nearly as well as
HC when it comes to the actual hospitality exchange.

Well I think this is a pure abuse of our service. We volunteers (you
and I and others) invest lots of our time in making HC succesful and
usable. Those members are using what we worked hard to build and
giving nothing to HC in return: they won't make HC a better place,
they won't even write comments to make it a safer place.

I think we all agree that this is unacceptable.

2) Maybe the user filled both his profiles in HC and CS just as well.
But in that case, the link to his CS profile does obviously not
qualify under our definition of a personal website giving more
information about the person. So if the person is not giving the link
to provide more information about herself, what is she giving it for?

That CS link is then totally useless unless it's seen as website
promotion. Which it clearly qualifies at, under our guidelines
(personal website = more info on member, anything else = promotion),
and thereby violates our rules:

"Do not send messages to another member that are not related
to the aim of The Hospitality Club. Those are especially but not
exclusively requests for help finding work, appartments and visa
invitations, website promotions and dating spam."

"Website and business promotions: messages that are sent to
promote other websites or business opportunities. Please note
that the mere mentioning is promotion. A suitable place for this
might be the forum category Links, Links, Links."

(Reminder: Promoting CS even above mere mentionning is now allowed in
the forum.)

I think this clarifies it for you that mentionning CS is indeed
against our rules and that you'll feel better about having to freeze
those messages.

You may wonder why we make such a big deal with CS and other such
networks, well here is a quick explanation. We volunteers that have
been involved since years in HC believe that it would be much more
beneficial for everybody and for the whole idea of free hospitality
exchange if there was only one centralised site. Why? Three reasons
mainly:

a) The TIME that members lose by filling their profiles on different
networks and having to visit each website.
b) The SPREADING OF VOLUNTEER RESOURCES experienced because each
website has its team of programmer working on the database, its team
of translator, etc., whereas those could all work together to get one
big website that would hence be much better than any one small
website.
c) The possibility that ABUSERS get to change to a different network
once they got many bad comments in another one and continue their
actions there with a blank new reputation.

The founder of CS (and all the other networks as a matter of fact)
doesn't recognise any of these criterions as he never tried to contact
us before or after creating his website. He is obviously a better web
designer than we were at the beginning and has many interesting ideas,
and we invited him to join us, share his ideas and implement them in
one large, unique, more efficient hospitality exchange network. We
offered him that repeatedly ever since he started his website, but
obviously he never agreed.

Hopefully those explanations will prove useful to the new team members
that were not with us yet when all those events and discussions took
place. And if you still feel any incomfort in freezing messages
containing website promotion, I urge you to answer my message and we
can further discuss why those rules were made and have to remain.

Cheers,
Valmi