Advertising/soliciting/self-promotion
Your purpose in joining MacRumors or posting should not be to promote, advertise, or otherwise call attention to your site, blog, product, or business. See this page if you want to advertise at MacRumors.
Self-promotion is not fair to our paid advertisers. Forum posts should be free of ads and promotions that benefit the poster. Legitimate recommendations and requests for help are permitted, but in ambiguous circumstances users without a previous forum track record will not be given the benefit of the doubt.
Rules:
Advertising. Using the forums for advertising, site or product promotion, or for business deals and offers. You may not make posts to promote commercial, personal, or not-for-profit websites, products, or services. Threads will be deleted if their purpose is to advertise, announce, or promote products, services, or organizations, build traffic at other websites, carry out business activities, or for similar purposes that do not benefit our forum community.
Shilling. If you pretend to be a consumer who recommends your own product(s) or favors your own product(s) over others, without admitting your affiliation, you will be banned. Vendors who post in threads only to criticize a competitor's product while promoting their own will also be banned.
Soliciting. You may not use the forums to solicit donations, votes, or participants for surveys, contests, or product testing. Employment requests/offers are limited to the Marketplace forum and subject to the Marketplace Rules.
Self-promotion. Self-promotional links to your blog, video channel, product, business, etc. are limited to your forum signature and your user profile, even if you have a wonderful and useful site, blog, product, or business.
Memberships created solely for these purposes will be banned.
Exceptions:
Developers of Mac OS X and iOS software are afforded special privileges, including certain posting of product promotions. See Guidelines for Software Developers for details.
Users may embed YouTube videos in their forum posts, using the youtube tag as long as it suits the thread discussion and their purpose for posting is not self-promotion.
Established users may post links to answers, reviews, or videos that answer specific questions from other users, even if it's their own site, as long as they don't use the forums primarily for such posts. New users without a history of other forum participation should not post self-links since it will be considered to be advertising/promotion.
As a representatives of a vendor business you may post about your company or products or services when the following 5 conditions apply:
You have made your vendor affiliation clear by filling in the Vendor Name and Vendor URL fields in your user profile and setting About Me to Everyone in your profile privacy options.
You are posting about Apple-related hardware, software, accessories, or services.
You represent, work for, or own a manufacturing, wholesale, distribution, or retail business (including software vendors).
You are replying to forum posts to answer questions when your product/service is particularly relevant to the question. Example: Your company or product was mentioned by name or your product suits a specific requirement being discussed.
The purpose of the post is to help forum members, not merely to benefit your organization.
Vendors must not use these privileges to
repeatedly mention their products in general discussion threads, even those about their market area
start threads to discuss, promote or advertise their business, products, or services
"badmouth" competing companies or products
use the forums to carry out business operations, e.g., solicit feedback, provide customer service, announce special deals, promos, or new products
