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I noticed today this reply which seemed like a biicode promotion, and after checking the user profile I saw another answer referring to the same company.

A look in the profile details of the user showed that she is working for the specific company, and based on the fact that her only two replies are referring to his company I wonder if there are rules regarding the issue of promoting a company.

Software Engineer at biicode

and in the linked website

I'm Julia S.Simon and I'm currently working at biicode.

Biicode is a spanish startup that aims to lower entry barriers for programmers making the hard stuff onf configuring project, dependencies and build for them.

Contact me if you need more information, or visit us and try it for free!

2 Answers 2

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Do not use signature, taglines, or greetings.

Every post you make is already “signed” with your standard user card, which links directly back to your user page. If you use an additional signature or tagline, it will be removed to reduce noise in the questions and answers.

Your user page belongs to you — fill it with information about your interests, links to stuff you’ve worked on, or whatever else you like!

Avoid overt self-promotion.

The community tends to vote down overt self-promotion and flag it as spam. Post good, relevant answers, and if some (but not all) happen to be about your product or website, that’s okay. However, you must disclose your affiliation in your answers.

If a large percentage of your posts include a mention of your product or website, you're probably here for the wrong reasons. Our advertising rates are quite reasonable; contact our ad sales team for details. We also offer free community promotion ads for open source projects and non-profit organizations.

From the help docs

If you see this, edit it (if needed), and post a comment saying that you need to clarify the relationship in the answer, since many people don't read profiles.

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While I cannot see the answers at present, in my experience of moderation over the past year, I have seen that sometimes people really don't know about Stack Exchange policies on self promotions. They are genuinely trying to answer the question, and an answer sometimes does happen to be an off-site resource being developed by the OP. As long as the post isn't blatant spam ("Buy handbags CHEAP HERE!!") and is an attempt to answer the question, the first response should be to comment and then delete with the not an answer flag.

Also, note that the spam flag comes with many network wide restrictions on the user account, along with a -100 penalty, so it should not be used lightly and certainly not be used for something that could be considered a valid attempt to answer, albeit poorly written or sounding like an advertisement.

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    A moderator can copy/paste the actual deleted reply and add it as a quote in my question if that helps the discussion.
    – alexan_e
    Mar 21, 2014 at 18:07
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    I second this opinion. Yesterday I could briefly see one of these answers to my question, but couldn't retrieve it later on. I remembered the name of the site so I looked for it -I had no time to check it thoroughly though- and that seemed to be a valid attempt to answer my question. I would like to mention that "with great power comes great responsibilities" and moderators should maybe use this power sparingly and open a door for discussion first. In general, I think that "shoot first, talk after" behavior may be harmful to this beta and potentially turn newcomers away.
    – jfpoilpret
    Mar 22, 2014 at 7:02
  • @jfpoilpret There was no other activity besides a comment, and both answers were advertising her company... only disclosed in their profile (not really read). 1 answer wasn't even a true answer to the question. There's also a policy about not doing all self-promotion. It seemed a little forced. I don't know of a place online where it is acceptable to just promote your product. Can Google place flyers on cars if they didn't know that it was illegal to do so in some areas? No, and the user has 18 SE accounts with 580+ rep on SO. She's not new.
    – Anonymous Penguin
    Mar 22, 2014 at 19:20
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    Honestly, do you really think ALL SE users are aware of SE policies? I'd be surprised if this number could already reach 10%
    – jfpoilpret
    Mar 23, 2014 at 8:41
  • @jfp It's no new concept... It's actually illegal to put flyers on cars. Why could you put ads as answers online? Most users don't know because it's not applicable to them. And 35+% have fewer rep than her.
    – Anonymous Penguin
    Mar 24, 2014 at 2:15
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    @AnnonomusPerson My post questions whether the "ads" were really ads. If the ad was relevant, then it could easily be rephrased to look more like an answer and less like an ad. While we don't want bad content on the site, we also don't want to delete everything without giving a chance to the OP. And biicode seems to be a relevant answer to the repo question. If the answer was just a link to a blog listing a set of tools, then that could be deleted as a link-only answer. But, this was? a link directly to the tool itself, which is however lacking, a valid answer.
    – asheeshr
    Mar 24, 2014 at 2:38

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