Communities and forums, and what gets a post removed

What we are solving

On this site the whole subject used to be one cell in a table: discussion venues, forums, Q&A sites, community threads. That is a placeholder, not coverage.

Page one for my main query held a competitor and other people’s lists, and those lists get written in venues where I have never posted anything at all.

I have not run a documented campaign in any of them either, so what follows is the venues’ own published rules plus the mechanism. It carries no result of mine.

Steps

The venues differ far more than a table suggests, so read the local rules before you take any general advice, this page included.

The sentence in the rules that covers your case

Every venue has one and it is short. Hacker News asks you not to use the site primarily for promotion, so posting your own stuff part of the time is fine there.

Lobsters puts a fraction on the same idea: self-promotion under a quarter of your stories and comments.

Find that sentence before you write anything. It is also the sentence a moderator will quote at you.

What a venue permits, which is not what it gets in traffic

Some have a slot for your own work: Show HN is for something you made that others can try. Some tolerate a ratio. Some allow a link only inside an answer to somebody’s question. Some strip links from accounts with no history.

Four different permissions mean four different posts, so if you sort the venues by traffic instead, you write the same post four times.

The account comes before the first link

A venue lets you in on account age, comment history and karma — the venue’s running score for an account, earned on comments other people found useful. Lobsters treats a user as new for their first 70 days.

An account registered on launch day posts its first link with no history behind it. That is the exact signature moderation filters on, and you cannot buy the history back later, which is why you open the account months early.

Answering instead of announcing

The comment has to stand alone with the link deleted. Put the answer in the comment itself, and if your product is part of the answer, it comes after the answer, in one sentence.

Say that it is yours in the first clause — “I built this” before the name, because undisclosed promotion is what gets a post removed and an account banned. Disclosure costs you a clause.

Then name the alternatives you are not selling, including the free path. A comment naming one product is an ad, and the disclosure does not change that, but a comment naming three tools, one of which is yours, is an answer.

What gets the account banned rather than the post

Never ask anyone to upvote. Hacker News says plainly not to solicit upvotes, comments or submissions, and coordinated voting is visible from inside the venue, so the penalty lands on the account and often on the domain.

Keep the link out of your signature and out of unrelated threads, because Google’s spam policies name both patterns. Forum comments with optimized links in the post or in the signature are listed there as link spam, and spammy posts on forum threads are listed as user-generated spam.

The thread is an asset six months later

Write for the person who arrives from search half a year after the thread, not for the thread’s first day. Thread traffic lasts one day. What keeps working is the thread page ranking for a query, and that page is also what an assistant fetches later.

Retrieval is the step where an assistant fetches pages before it answers, through a search index or through a live request for one URL. So your comment becomes retrievable once the page holding it is indexed, and not before.

Thread pages get indexed on the venue’s schedule and not on yours, and I have not measured that lag anywhere, so treat it as unknown rather than as short.

Tag the link you post, one value per venue: where the user actually came from. Untagged, a venue that worked and a venue that did nothing produce the same empty report.

What did not work

• Leaving the channel as one cell in a table. The row named forums, Q&A sites and community threads, and stopped there. Four people read the site. Two of them named that row as the largest hole in it.
• One launch post as the plan. The graph spiked for a day and lay flat the next, because a post is an event and a channel is a habit. I had been running the channel as a post.
• Spending the week on directory forms instead. Page one for my query held a competitor and other people’s lists, and filling forms touched neither the competitor nor the lists.
• Publishing links with no tag. It had already happened with directory submissions: the listings went live, and no arrival could be traced to any of them. A forum comment is the same link with the same hole in it.
• Assuming my own site was the door. No signup carried a source, so the share I could attribute to the site is unknown: where the user came from. Ranking the site was real work. I just aimed it at a channel I never showed the audience was using.
• Writing this page without having run the campaign. Nothing above is a measurement: every step is either a published venue rule or a mechanism I can argue for. Reading it as a result would be reading it wrong.

Verify

• Open the venue’s rules page and find the sentence that covers your case, and if there is none, ask a moderator before you post.
• Read your own comment logged out, from another network. Some venues remove a post while leaving it visible to its author.
• Search a distinctive sentence from your comment, restricted to the venue’s host with site:, and until that search returns your comment, nothing can retrieve it.
• Check referrals carrying that venue’s tag after a week, and again after a month, because the month is the reading that matters.
• Count your promotional comments against your other ones in the same venue. Lobsters draws that line at a quarter. Quieter venues are not more permissive.
• Ask an assistant for tools in your category, several runs each, and note whether it names a community thread at all, and which one.

The listing side of off-site work is where the first external links come from. Inside a platform the index is different again: search inside the platform.