So a strange thing happened to me on the webhosting talk forums. I check the various web hosting and control panel forums to see if anyone is having any problems I can help with, including with any of our software (ART repo, ASL, gotroot rules, etc.). In several cases I've provided answers to users that involved downloading an update to either an RPM, or our modsecurity rules. And in each case, the forum moderators removed the links!

Um... so, you cant point them to the answer apparently. Turns out, providing links to some other site is forbidden on webhostingtalk, from their rules:



Wow, thats pretty stupid if you ask me. This being the internet and all, and a download requiring - oh I dunno a link, linking seems reasonable to me. Apparently not to webhostingtalk. So, nope, no links allowed. I guess you just tell people to google for it... yes, thats not only unhelpful, thats rude IMHO.

Im all for keeping forums clean and keeping the spam out, but their policy in this regard seems way too stringent, and I've had too many posts modified to the point of being useless to try. To all the wonderful people on those forms, I wish I had a solution that didnt involve pointing you to the download. Maybe someone smarter than me can explain that to me.

So, in the interests of helping people, if anyone here happens to frequent those forums and sees someone asking for help, do try to encourage them to come here to ask their questions about our software - at least we can link to things here! I'm tired of providing the answer and only finding out that some moderator removed the links. I makes my posts seem rude and unhelpful. Its damn annoying to be honest.

And really I would hate it if someone couldnt get an answer and had a bad experience with anything we publish because they either think we provided a halfassed answer or simply cant get an answer there and thinks somehow we dont care. It really pains me that webhostingtalk is running a forum that it so black and white about their rules to the point of inanity. I really would like to be able to help people there, but I have no idea how that can be done if the answer is "Ah, just go download this rpm from this link", if you cant actually post the link.

So, regretably I'm not going to waste my time there anymore.

Maybe someone here knowns the people that run webhostingtalk and can find out a way to solve this problem? I've asked their helpdesk, and the answers so far havent been particuarly helpful. Or maybe I'm just wasting my time!

(And really, no one else has these crazy policies! Every other forum in the world gets that linking to a download is common sense!)