Regarding this issue, if anyone should require legal assistance, I would like to offer my services atā¦
Iām kidding. I think this is a good policy so that BA.org doesnāt wind up becoming a sea of Blender-related advertising with little actual content in between to keep our attention. Much like television.
I also like how tolerant you are being about it. Most places would simply delete and ban.
From glancing down this thread and those that are doubtful, I think the idea is to just keep promotional and problematic posts to a minimum. Itās a common trend on many forums to just keep posting and linking to your own works (paid addons, courses, models, etc) with every other reply. From what I can gather, theyāre simply trying to curb that and asking people to be a bit more considerate. Itās not a free for all bilboard after all.
It simply applies to promotional posts/threads.
I trust @bartv. For something like this to be needed implies the severity of the underlying issue. I know he generally wants to target promo dumps, but, and this has been stated several times in the thread already, the policy itself felt very restrictive and the exceptions to the policy felt very handwavy.
To be honest, I had written a fairly heated comment this weekend, but I decided to wait, because what eventually became an edit to OP was what I felt was going to happen anyway, and my comment wouldnāt have been useful.
Over the past years Iāve been working on a non-commercial addon out of pure passion and have been contemplating on a public release on BA, but the lack of defined constraints in the policy made me think twice, because the policy in its current form requires me to read between the lines, when I obviously shouldnāt be 
I tend to spend most of my time in python support, and while I do enjoy it, there may go weeks between my posts and I wouldnāt call my self particularly involved, certainly not by the high community involvement metric, which was my gripe.
I hope to see a more refined list of whatās considered self-promotions and whatās not, preferably with examples, what intervals, type of posts, actions (liking, flagging posts, etc.) and categories are considered great community involvement. How are those three words, in the context of the policy, meaningfully quantified?
perhaps we can rate the ākarmaā of a post.
(people helping get positive karma, people perceive as trying to take are awarded negative karma?)
Itās by design that this is up to the staff to enforce, not users. A Reddit-esque free-for-all popularity contest is not really in the spirit of this site
yeah, I would have it be a moderation crew thing
Please do so.
Disclaimer: I am not a moderator, but I do trust those who are.
From what I understand in your case there should not be any problem with this new policy.
It does not sound as if you will be posting continuous new threads with just self promotion links.
From your profile it is easy to see that you do engage with the community in a positive way.
The new policy aims to restrict the amount of āabusiveā self promotion posts, not to ban all kinds of self promotion. Bart has already stated that it is flexible. If it was a strict interpretation just posting a render could be considered self promotion!
There are many commercial addons that have thriving threads, hard opps etc I do not think they are āabusiveā
Would anyone consider Chris Jonesās Human Progress thread as āabusive self promotionā? I am sure they would not.
I think we can trust Bart and the rest of the mods on this.
That thread is crazy busy! Iām not even sure what itās supposed to be about but I get the feeling itās a guy who is trying to work on his character model(s). If heās trying to sell or commercialise those models, then itās no longer a Work In Progress and it shouldnāt even be there, which renders the discussion about promoting himself moot. There is a policy of sorts on here where they ask people who are selling things to add the #commercial tag as well.
I think whatās needed is an example. When I ran a forum (years ago now,) I used to get people literally posting adverts about their products and services and it was the only thing they ever contributed. It was a major annoyance and I had to implement a policy similar to this. The moderators are really not fussed about day-to-day āmini-advertsā where you post a link to something that you (or someone else) has done as long as itās relevant, accessible and youāve explained what the link actually is and how to access the information. I donāt think anyone is going to complain about about you mentioning addonās youāve built for example, as long as the addon youāve mentioned actually solves their particular problem. They also donāt want you talking about your addon to be the only reason you interact with people on the site.
At the very least, thatās my understanding of this situation. I think itās being overthought on both sides - the admins might be over-explaining it and the user-base might be mis-interpreting. I hope this is a good āpiggy in the middleā view to the matter.
I should probably point out Iām not a moderator too 
Itās not terribly hard to find an example- Iām not going to call anyone out specifically, because that would be unethical, but go look through #support:tutorials-tips-and-tricks and see if you can find any users that post something self-promotional many times a month and donāt engage with the community at all beyond that. (You can.) Iām personally aware of multiple users that follow this pattern and have been doing so for a long time.
Thereās a clear difference between this kind of behavior and providing support for an add-on, @iceythe Iād encourage you to try this exercise and see what I mean. With a bit of exploration, you can easily see both why this policy is necessary and why thereās so much nuance needed for it.
Youāre right. I was gonna type up an example but I decided against it in the end. I shouldāve probably taken that line out 
I just did thatā¦ it looks like 90% of posts there are just ādrive byā things announcing āhere is my thing you can see/get somewhere elseā¦ byeā .
Yep, that more or less matches our data For anyone with doubts about this policy, Iād recommend taking 5 minutes to try this out. It will quickly show why itās needed.