Serge Pilko (@Softacom) just made his second post a link to one of his YouTube videos. The video is about REST servers and was posted to YouTube 11 months ago.
Serge’s first post was about a month ago and was again a link to one of his YouTube videos, a comparison of Flutter, FMX and Xamarin, originally posted to YouTube 6 months ago.
I gather Serge is a European Embarcadero MVP and appears to be producing good content. He’s certainly not flooding us with link posts but he’s made no other posts here or on the old mailing list.
If these links had been posted in reply to a question about REST servers or a discussion about FMX vs Flutter/Xamarin, I wouldn’t have a problem with them.
If someone else other than Serge had posted them here because they thought they were especially valuable content I wouldn’t have a problem with them.
If Serge was a regular contributor and made a post saying he’d started making YouTube videos and linked to his YouTube channel I wouldn’t have a problem with that.
To be clear I’m not egregiously offended by Serge’s video posts but perhaps they’re better suited to BeginEnd or DelphiFeeds than here. If the membership agrees perhaps we should look into making this clear during new user registration somehow.
It’s a tricky one. In Serge’s case, the volume has been low and I found both the videos interesting. However, I wouldn’t like this to just become a dumping ground of links.
I wonder if there is a middle ground like some reddits, where it’s ok to post a link, provided there is some attempt to begin a discussion that goes along with it. Not just the video description.
I think the differentiating factor here is that the content author is posting their own material and they don’t have a pre-existing history on the forum.
If they were posting other people’s content (which is what mostly happens on reddit I think) or were a frequent contributor I don’t think there would be an issue.
Here though we’ve got someone who hasn’t been a contributor, posting months old content from their own back catalogue. In absence of any other contributions it feels like they’re just trying to drive traffic to their YouTube channel.
His content looks good but if Serge keeps visiting us every few weeks just to post another link to a video from his back catalogue, it won’t be long before other posters appear wanting to regularly post links to their content as well.
I’m sceptical as to what that looks like. It can’t be just a,
“So what do you think?”
which I feel is what you’re going to get most of the time from someone who doesn’t visit here regularly.
I don’t want to sound too “locals only”, we have to accept this is a more public forum than the mailing list was. Posting links shouldn’t be anyone’s primary motivation to join the forum though. Contribute regularly and nobody is going to care if you post the occasional link.
On a related note I see that @Softacom has a pretty good Delphi blog but it isn’t indexed by either BeginEnd or DelphiFeeds. Serge should request it be added to those sites which will expose his content to a lot more people than are here on our forums.
Adding my 2 cents, what I see in some other Discourse forums and also chat platforms like Slack and Discord, is some channel/category like “3rd party”, “advertisements”, or something like that, where such posts are allowed. This way users can mute such channels if they want to.
In a way, it’s a way to add content to the forum without bothering users too much. But still it can get out of control.
Personally, I’d like to see Delphi stuff signal-boosted on the web in general. It’s not like we are overflowing with content for the language. (Overflowing would be great imho)
A section specifically for “Recent Delphi stuff out on the web” from sources smaller than (eg say) Embarcadero & TMS might be good to have.
As for SEO etc, discourse adds the nofollow attribute to external links, so google etc do not follow the links and they don’t influence his rankings. So while posting here might improve his visibility (we see them) it likely won’t improve his seo much (if at all).
My vote would be to move them to the third party category.