Zack Kneisley wrote: > I don't feel that ANY promotion of products or services in a signature of > this particular list should be allowed unless you pay for it.
That gets into the incredibly fuzzy question of "what counts as promotion," though. Let's take the email thread, as an example. If I'm the owner of SuperDeluxeEmail and post "you should use my company because it's the best," that's probably self-promotion. What if I say "you should use my company because I'm a WISPA member?" Is that promotion, or an advertisement of the sort WISPA has been known to offer to paying vendor members? What if I don't disclose that I own SuperDeluxeEmail? What if I'm using a sock puppet to tell people how awesome SuperDeluxeEmail is? What if, instead of being the owner of the company, I'm just a minority investor? Or "merely" a very satisfied customer? What if I think it's a lousy company and I want you to use their service so you'll think it's lousy and join me in publicly bad-mouthing them? There's a lot of subtle levels here. Honestly, IMO a lot of the value of this list comes from the fact that a lot of different vendors are directly, or indirectly, represented here. A little self-promotion is probably inevitable, and probably healthy. (If you can't promote yourself and your business at least a little bit, you won't be in business for very long.) Giving WISPA money doesn't (or at least shouldn't) mean that everyone walks on eggshells around your booth in the ongoing trade show that is this mailing list, and doesn't mean that we'll overlook any problems or shortcomings in your product. Conversely, if you make a good product, we won't ignore it out-of-hand because you haven't yet tithed. (We'll probably encourage you to do so, but...) If we're going to start treating some folks differently based solely upon whether they're paying members of WISPA, this list loses a lot of its value. David Smith Employed by [[ That information is not available at your security clearance, citizen. ]] -- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
