Is this user advertising his product acceptable?

Question

I noticed quite a number of posts where someone would advertise an alternative serialization library, since I more or less follow the boost-serialization tag.

Just now, I got another one: Packing struct in Boost Asio buffer, and decided to have a look.

To my surpise, this user https://stackoverflow.com/users/1639596/wood-brian has almost exclusively self-promoting answers.

• The vast majority of his 39 answers mention and link to his library^[1].
• Most often, it starts out with a link, and
• Not infrequently the answer has a tenuous link to the question, and sometimes, the answer doesn't contain anything more than just the link

I do realize this is at least in part a work of love. I do personally feel it's a bit too much, though, and it might have crossed the invisible line where it becomes abuse of StackOverflow for advertising purposes.

• In particular, I feel that all three "checks" offered in Andrew Barber's answer "Is it allowed to put links to personal technical blogs having advertising in SO answers or comment?" have been neglected
• The statistics in this much heavily-debated case were far less outrageous (Brian has a 90% advertising pay load rate, way higher than this "spammer"'s mere 16%!)
• There's jurisprudence in the Ira Baxter case (episodes 1..n, see "Limits for self-promotion in answers")

I don't know whether the guy has any commercial interest in spreading his library, but aside from that, the principle should be considered: when is spam spam, and when is it somehow acceptable? Or, when do we allow advertising, even though we prohibit it in general?

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^[1] In fact, it's easier to link the few answers that are not advertising his product:

• Best container for C++ class objects
• C++: fastest to write vector file to output in normal text mode (not binary) in C or C++
• IPC message queues how to send a vector of pairs
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13445172/how-to-boostserialize-an-exception/13445874#13445874 (on the bright side, he's maintaining his answers). NOTE This one links to his site, but doesn't directly advertise his product as the solution, so I don't count it in my list of "offenses"(?)

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Here's a collage of the 18 most recent answers in case they get clobbered/are inaccessible to <10k users.

Update November 10th 2014 added a chapter to this story. In a now-deleted meta.SO question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/276430/a-stubborn-self-promotor-has-returned ) I exposed a list of newly added answers by the same poster. In the interest of historical reference, here is a screenshot of that question after @animuson handled it: https://i.stack.imgur.com/mB9y1.png

Answer 1

While promoting your open source library on Stack Overflow is perfectly fine, I felt this user was a few steps over the self-promotion line.

• The vast majority of posts were linking to their own work.
• A lot of those posts contained little information other than the link.
• There was no disclosure of their affiliation.
• They really weren't helping the SO community in any other (non-promotional) way.

This all combined gives me the feeling that the user was here exclusively to promote their own work. I deleted their promotional posts and sent them a warning. If they can edit the more helpful posts (particularly the ones with code examples) to include a disclosure of affiliation, those posts could be undeleted.

Answer 2

I think this is spam and it shouldn't be allowed.

I flagged one post with a link to this meta post, and as a result, 37 posts of the user are deleted, so I assume at least one mod thinks it is spam too and as such not acceptable.