Yesterday I created a community here for my indie game studio and made a single post to describe the new game we’re working on, only to find out today that it was banned for “spam” (according to the modlog).

I’ll respect the mods’ decision of course but I admit I’m mostly confused; did I miss something in the ToS and this kind of community is not allowed here? (or did I read the wrong ToS? The one I found here didn’t mention anything about this.)

  • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneM
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    3 months ago

    They’re allowed. The problem is, you flagged every red flag you could on the way in.

    Your application to the instance was pretty generic. It said the right words but didn’t feel as genuine as some others.

    Then after joining, you didn’t link to an existing account or community, you didn’t engage with anyone else, and your first action was to create a community and a post linking to an offsite blog.

    It’s the same thing we see from blog spammers, which is what I assumed you were.

    I’m happy to restore the post if you still want it, and if you plan on being involved with the wider lemmy community above and beyond making posts linking to an extremal site

    • Linkyu@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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      3 months ago

      Oh, yeah that makes sense; I guess if I had created it with this account instead of making a dedicated account it would have seemed less suspicious, now that I think about it (Also, I linked to an outside blog because I couldn’t figure out what the issue was with the image uploads so I hoped it would at least use that offsite thumbnail (which it didn’t) but I can see how that makes it even worse hah).

      And yeah restoring it sounds great! I’d be happy to be involved, my goal is to have a community I can interact with here in addition to other socials, not to simply barge in and direct people out (if anything, if I can get more people to join Lemmy, that’s even better).

      That said, it would probably be better if I used this account here for it instead of the one I created yesterday, right?

      • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneM
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        3 months ago

        The community, post and account have been restored!

        And yeah, my advice would be to login with your new account, make your existing account a moderator of the community too, and then do most of your communication/moderation from the account with an active history!

  • CTDummy
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    3 months ago

    Maybe got caught up in other spam. I saw a similar post to your description (someone promoting their own game) posted to about 6 different communities with a short time frame. Maybe yours looks similar or came on a day mods were dealing with a lot of similar content. I don’t see why indie devs can’t promote their own stuff but get not wanting companies to make their own comms and spam other instances with it.

    • Linkyu@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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      3 months ago

      Yeah I get it too, and looking at the full community list, I don’t see a single company-related community, so it’s probably the reason.

      If that is indeed the reason though, I think it should be more explicit in the ToS so that people don’t do the same thing; no need to give mods more work than necessary

      • CTDummy
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        3 months ago

        It’d be worth finding out. Otherwise there’d be no lemmy equivalent to games having their own sub for community interaction like on reddit. Which is useful for players support as much as it is for the devs promoting it.