As AI is making it easier and easier to build software, we're seeing more people coming to this forum primarily to promote their projects. Typically, they create an account specifically for this purpose, having never participated in the community before, and essentially use the forum as a free promotional channel.
Promoting commercial products is definitly not allowed. On the other hand we normally accept open source projects, but within reason, and the increasing amount of AI-generated software means we need to reconsider where we draw the line.
There's nothing wrong with building software this way, but neither does being open source automatically entitle a project to free promotion on the Joplin forum. In particular, if an account has been created primarily to advertise a project, we may remove the post even if that project is open source. We don't have ads on the forum, let alone free ads.
As with AI-generated pull requests, there isn't going to be a perfectly objective line. So moderation decisions might seem arbitrary but hopefully it will be fair for everybody.
As a reminder we had this in our T&C for a long time:
https://discourse.joplinapp.org/tos#18
- Promotional posts
Content that promotes services or products, whether related to Joplin or not, is not allowed on the forum. We may give an authorisation on a case-by-case basis - for this, please contact one of the moderators by PM.
I used this rule once in the past 10 years, but in the past week alone I had to use it twice, so I expect we'll get more and more of these projects.