[wp-forums] Ethical practices of consultants

[Joni Mueller]

Here's some paraphrased text I found on the net that might help develop what you are after:

"Forum members may not use information from the forum, such as names, emails, and phone numbers, to contact other forum members for ANY reason other than responding directly to a request for contact made in the forum. Forum members may NOT offer any other service, advice, comment, or recommendation that was not specifically requested in a post. We want forum members to feel that they can include their names or email addresses in their post or on their profile without being bombarded with unwanted email from other forum members. It is NOT okay to send another forum member an email or otherwise contact them away from the forum in a way that would be considered unwelcome by most people. 
 
"Example: A forum member who runs a web development agency  may not take email addresses from a forum member's profile in order to send people information about their business. 

"The moderators will do their best to make sure that the privacy of forum members is protected. Forum members  who are unable to follow the forum policies on privacy and solicitation will be banned."


Joni Mueller
Pixelita Designs
http://www.pixelita.com
________________________________________
On Behalf Of Mark Ratledge [mark at markratledge.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 30, 2010 7:07 PM
To: wp-forums at lists.automattic.com
Subject: [wp-forums] Ethical practices of consultants

On Jun 30, 2010, at 5:39 PM, James Huff wrote:

> The basic format of such a topic (which would be closed and sticky, btw) would include a brief bit on what we consider to be "ethical practices"...

Thoughts:

I think there should be real clarity in what is considered to be ethical and what is considered to be not ethical.

Should people or consultants *never* email people offering to fix what they need fixed? Can people or consultants email help seekers with a simple "contact me if you are interested?"

Sounds like there will be a list of unethical consultants; will there be a list of ethical consultants? And who decides that?

Should be people be pointed to jobs.wordpress.net or sites like Elance?

I can already see this: what's the process when a consultant is blacklisted and they subsequently raise hell about it in the forums? Delete the thread? Delete the user?