h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi HappyDude, Mina gave me the heads-up on this thread, sorry to have taken so long to get back to you.

The thing about what governs whether or not a specific page on a site is commercial or not seems to be a bit of a difficult grey area, so if you'll bear with me while I try to explain how I view it, and then hopefuly it might make things easier.



Firstly, in these discussions, I'm speaking very generally to give you examples of reasons why postings and links might have been failed. As this is a grey area, there are no absolute answers - the freedom that h2g2 has over other BBCi sites is that we allow links to external sites (something that, for example, the chatrooms don't allow). If you want to push for absolute answers, then you could potentially risk losing that freedom (the easiest absolute answer being 'no external links allowed') - and none of us want that (have you seen how many links to IMDB I do?!)

With regard to the reference to 'shop areas', I've used a deliberately vague phrase to mean any page that is geared towards getting you to buy something. That doesn't limit it to ones that have shopping basket icons, although such pages would probably qualify, and it doesn't necessarily mean that all shops don't have information pages that might be legitimate to link to. I see nothing in Mina's explanation of the failed link that doesn't tally with this interpretation as she too is merely giving examples of likely reasons for a link to be failed.



Secondly, we try to treat each item/link/instance on its own merits, and sometimes there might be two items which fall into the grey area which end up resolved in two different ways. The fact that we try to remain both flexible *and* consistent is occasionally going to mean that decisions necessitate further discussion.

To give an example, there are ways around the specific problem you've highlighted here. It would have been far better for you to have linked to an information page, such as http://www.ionichosting.net/service.php which describes the services of the company without doing the hard-sell; whereas the page you linked to is quite clearly geared towards promoting the hosting services of the company.

If you want to direct someone to a specific page on a commercial site, one way round this is to link to their 'About Us' page - which usually (but not always) is just a bit of information about the company with no direct 'salesy' bit. Such pages will often have menu bars that allow people the choice of exploring further and you could, in some instances, describe to people in your post how to find other information without turning your post into an advert for the *services* of the site (which will probably get your post failed).

There are, of course, exceptions to the above, but as a *general* rule, posting to non-product information pages will be less likely to be failed than pages plugging products.

Right, it's 7.25pm and I'm off home.

Jimster

Thanks for the clarification, between you & Mina I think we all have a clearer idea of wot we can post

Now to move on...

I Yikesed Post 1 - my own post with regard to the links, it has now been referred to the Ed's BUT this has exposed a bug in the System ... This thread is now shown as having "No Subject" in the conversations list

Strange that

But thanks Mina and Jimster In that case then, [Broken link removed by Moderator] is a website host provided by a good friend and fellow h2g2'er, Chris Tonks, who, strangely uses his Real name in his h2g2 name, with a twist. Some of you will know him as Prof. C. Tonks... How's that?

They do offer shell accounts, but you need to set it up in your control panel, it seems, I'm just off to find out how, HappyDude

The Telnet SSH link is to their Java Applet, so I'm sure you could use a normal Telnet Program with them

Oh, but there is one thing - typing this:

USER (my_username)
PASS (**********************)

Results in "Permission Denied" - Yet FTP access lets me in, using, it seems, the same commands, although I know FTP and Telnet are different things

Ah. FTP Now isn't letting me in, but my password for FTP, Telnet, The control panel and the base e-mail account works for the control panel, but nothing else

I'm going to have to chase this one up!

So my post 6 scraped through by the thinist of margins then

*giggles*

wonders if we should revive this thread