Forum for Third Party Add-Ons?

[John Scheffel]

I was recently contacted by someone who develops and sells enhancements Modules for Modeling. He asked if it would be OK to post information about his products in the forums. I don't have any objection to this since I think it benefits the user community to know what options are available. On the other hand, this is sort of advertising and it may not be appropriate to post this information in the current forums which are for discussion of the standard tools.

One option would be to add a new forum for promotion and discussion of third part add-on products for the CoCreate tools. This would keep it separate from the current discussion forums so people who are not interested could avoid it.

If you have an opinion on this topic, please vote and post any thoughts you have as a reply.

If we allow this type of advertising in either a new forum or the existing forums, we will need to post some guidelines for what is and is not allowed. Any suggestions are welcome, but here are a few that come to mind.

The product being promoted must in some way enhance the standard CoCreate tools.
It is OK to post a reply with information about a third party product if that product provides a solution to a question or problem posted by someone else.
Posting the same information in multiple forums or multiple times in the same forum is not allowed.

[May Kung]

What you have outlined sounds reasonable. Keeping it a separate forum will make it easier to find. Also, it (should) make it clear that they are 3rd Party products, not CoCreate products.

[Andy Poulsen]

I agree that the proposed guidelines seem reasonable, and that a separate forum may be most appropriate.

If a separate forum is created, it appears the first and third suggested guidelines would apply equally to all forums (including the new one), while the second would apply to the current forums.

This second guideline may require some clarification i.e. how should questions be handled that are posted in one of the current forums (say Modeling) when a 3rd party module will provide a solution?

One option in a situation like this could be to post a message in the Modeling forum saying something like "Please see the related discussion in the 3rd Party forum for an add-on solution" and an additional post in the 3rd party forum addressing the issue. One positive aspect of this solution is that people who don't wish to deal with 3rd party applications don't have to read about them, and a corresponding negative aspect is that now there are 2 branches of the initial thread, which may make the discussion more difficult to follow.

On the other hand, in the past there have been a few posts where a 3rd party add-on module would work well to solve a particular problem, and the information for that module or company has simply been posted as a reply to the original message, and I'm not aware of any problems in those situations.

Thanks for looking into this! Other thoughts?

andy

[clausb]

I'd always be hesitant to add more discussion forums. The traffic in the existing forums is fairly low, so separating out some of it into new forums only scatters discussions, which reduces overall interest in the site, but does not significantly improve ease of use. (Look at what happened to the regional forums: 13 forums for only 42 messages overall. I don't think a lot of people still check those forums on a regular basis...)

So if someone has an add-on for, say, Modeling, it'd be perfectly fine with me if they post an announcement in the Modeling forum as long as they follow the usual netiquette rules (no pompous marketing messages, use links to external web sites for detail information instead of flooding the forum etc.). If they don't follow those common sense rules, we still have moderators to deal with such violations.

As a compromise, why not use prefix conventions for the subject lines of certain types of messages, such as "Announcement:" or "Commercial:". If we find that we get a lot of those, we can still move them out to a new forum.

Claus

[John Scheffel]

Based on the 8 to 3 vote as of Jun 3, it looks like the trend is clear. So I have added a new forum per the discussion in this thread. I will add a sticky thread in the forum with guidelines for use of the forum. If you have any feedback (corrections, suggestions, etc), please post it here.