No offense intended, imho, but you come off sounding a bit jealous of saabnet's alleged commercial success (and/or its success in garnering significant web traffic). Yes, Saabnet (and I presume Scott, its owner), has a certain commercially driven agenda. Given that, it's not very surprising they want to "protect" their interests. "Protection" might include blocking blatant adverts for other competing sites. Such adverts would be akin to hanging a BMW banner on the front door of Saab's headquarters....why would Saab put up with that? They'd probably have the person who hung the banner, arrested....and rightfully so.
I'm definitely in agreeance that this newsgroup works very well. That's (IMHO anywany) mainly because Saab's are fairly esoteric so the quantity of trash postings is very low compared to a lot of other newsgroups, and this encourages good quality discussions with a fairly short 'latency' between posts and followups.
Yes and no. Anyone's welcome to derive commercial gain if they can providing it doesn't affect others. Saabnet's pretty much innocent there. I just disagree with Scott's policy of instantly barring someone who might include a link in a posting which goes to another site which has forums (as one example of the stuff he is unable to tolerate existing at other sites). If I posted something on Saabnet and the posting included something about saablink.net or saabscene.co.uk it would probably result in the same thing happening.
Quite possibly, but the fact that bulletin-board access at Saabnet doesn't require becoming a paid member means that Scott (and anyone else who admins the site with him) should by inference be tolerant of discussions where others sites which might or might not have Saab-related forums get mentioned in postings either directly as references during discussions, as website links relating to the author of the posting, etc. Scott doesn't allow that - it's a bit of a dichotomy to make forums available for unrestricted public consumption but still 'censor' postings to create the impression that Saabnet is the only site which has Saab-related forums for people who only go to Saabnet for whatever reason.
I support Saabnet for what it is, but not for what it does. Like everything else, it's a case of caveat emptor (aka buyer beware). I don't tell people who ask me that using Saabnet is bad because the Saabnet boards are actually very good IMHO - I just point out the incongruous approach to tolerance of other Saab-related resources that happen to offer some services that are similar to some of the things at Saabnet.
Scott bars people for much more trivial reasons than cross commercial advertising. I could post my complete story, but lets just say that anything that could impact someone visiting his site in the farthest stretches of your imagination is grounds for being barred. Not only did he ban me, he deleted all (hundreds) of my posts over a couple of years on NG900 issues - much to the disdain of many of the regular posters. He's a fanatic. He once (maybe still) banned anyone from posting from mindspring.com because there was one person posting from there he didn't like and he couldn't figure out how to filter just one person - so he banned all of mindspring.
But, it's his site, he can do what he wants. I made a decision not to contribute my knowledge to build his profit. He can take his site and stick it where the Internet doesn't go.
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