templ1 account

I think we need to define between spammer posting about home refinance and replica watches and annoying or tacky posts. I'll leave the block, but I think tagging on "spammer" to the username is a bit excessive (I removed it) since their posts are on-topic, but just tacky. Is there a pre-written conduct letter someone can email to them and potentially unblock their account?

"excessive posting" is better than "spammer" maybe?

Either way, I like having the username in the title of the post because it makes it easier to find later and for people who read issues via e-mail or tracker to know from the subject whether or not they should respond about a specific item. It was hard for me to find this issue after the title was changed.

I agree that a template "you overposted, cool it" could be nice but don't plan to write it.

Title change on the issue was unintentional... I just loaded the form before VeryMisunderstood submitted a change. Username in title is helpful.

this is not nice at all... just unblock my account. Yes, true, I have posted some news about our themes, do you find it really wrong, or too different from what other people do in the front page...

I unblocked your account, however now that you're aware that there is some public dislike of your repeated sales efforts, continuing as you were will probably lead to a permanent block. One post is enough - reposting the same thing over and over again is undesired. Since this is on my head, I'll also be passing by your track page on my regular rounds.

is this a threat?!! all offers are brand new. not repeated posts. but probably I am done, because will have no more promotions for a while. Let me ask you this, how can we post in the front page of drupal.org like other people do, when they release a book or some other thing?
Do we have to pay somebody or simply try to be nice to some people...

There are lots of people with user blocking powers and I won't be unblocking you again, that's all I mean.

you still did not reply my question... how can we publish an article in drupal.org frontpage, because I don't even see an option to submit there.
I am not very familiar with drupal.org because have been always busy, but we have contributed to drupal by building a lot of drupal powered websites, now releasing themes and soon a set of modules....

Do something that a collective of important people think is neat enough to tell others about.

What is the definition of important people. The important people here are the team members I guess. A lot of people like our themes and are really excited about their look and easy of use. Are they important?

It doesn't sound right to me. I am not saying that my post fits in the front page, even though I believe it is more suitable than many other posts there. But what doesn't sound right, is that first I should contact a bunch of people and try to convince them...
There should be a place to submit articles for the frontpage, then your team can decide if the submitted article is good or not.

We already have such a place. If you thought a post was genuinely front page worthy, you'd make a new issue here in the Drupal.org webmasters queue.

5 sentence thread :) that's a forum post... I am not going to write a composition to post in a forum...
we know how to write articles if it were the case...
What I am saying is that there should be an area to submit the articles, then up to the team to decide if they are worthy or not...

ok, thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

so, we have just started making drupal themes, the initial feedback has been really promising, people like them designwise and for their easy to use. We are making a great initial promotion, offering 10 themes for $100.

On the other hand %10 of every order goes as donation towards http://www.canpku.org , the Canadian PKU and Allied disorders foundation.

If you think that this makes a news article frontpage worthy, I will write an article. I do not want to post again in the forum as it would really look as spam...

ok, I get it. thanks again. I wish I had known this before the mess...
I will write an article and hope it will be posted...

http://drupal.org/node/280488

This is malicious, not misguided.
See the revision history of that page to see what has been done there.

itemplaters behaviour (and the use of multiple accounts) is clearly unprofessional.
The only possible excuse is that they don't know a thing about how Drupal or Drupal.org content is managed - which is a bad sign in a self-promoting 'drupal service'

I did as I was told, they told me that I have to edit that page, to post an article.
It is the first time I am using drupal.org
So any help is appriciated. There is nothing malicious...

You do not add content by erasing exisiting drupal.org administration pages and replacing it with your own self promotions. By trying to do so you have damaged the "front page" queue and it will have to be rolled back. That is Graffiti.
The page you erased contained instructions which you were clearly unable to read.

Pure commercial self promotions without any meat or even a case study will just not be put on the front page.

You show no understanding of the Drupal CMS - so to advertise yourself like that just makes you look silly. Whatever you think you are trying to achieve - you are doing it wrong and deserve to be blacklisted simply for a gross lack of nettiquette unseemly in a web development company.

http://drupal.org/node/280488/revisions/406569/view is what dman is referring to (a revision of the front page docs that I reverted).

http://drupal.org/node/add/forum/8, where you've already been is where to post things for the front page. Please don't wipe out existing content.

first of all, that was I was told to do. However, does any user have permission to edit that :)
I think that is silly....

I do not want to post anymore in the forum, as I have already posted a couple of short threads, and another one would be too much...
I have written an article as per your advise which I want to submit for revision, if you guys see it appropriate for the frontpage.

Erasing that page is most certainly NOT what you were told to do (emphasis is mine):

If you have something that's really, really interesting to a lot of visitors to drupal.org and you did a really good job of writing the post (images, good writing, proper use of formatting to make it readable) then you can request it to be promoted to the front page. To do that, edit this page and schedule a time for your post and then create a webmaster issue for your post. Unless they are highly relevant, the teaser should not contain widgets or images from external sites (i.e. no "digg this" button in the teaser).

Are you unable to read? Nevermind for a second that a 350 word commercial is not "really really interesting to a lot of visitors to drupal.org", you don't even bother to read simple instructions before wiping out an entire page. Had you even glanced at the page before you erased it you would have noticed it was a schedule and not the actual front page posts.

As dman points out, your cluelessness about how drupal.org works is a sure sign you're not a professional drupal services company.

The fact is your commercial is not going to be posted on the front page, nor should it be. And it has nothing to do with making nice with the right people. It's not appropriate. Period.

Move on and be grateful you've not been permanently blocked.

I think that is silly....

No, what is silly is that we have wasted so much time from valuable community members dealing with you and you don't read the documentation that people direct you to read.

I have blocked your account again. In my opinion, it should stay this way for a week or so. Perhaps that will give you enough time to read the documentation about how to interact with the site and then your account could be re-enabled.

Marking "needs review" since the action here is not yet complete.

Wow, you made a big deal out of this.
I already said it is my first time using drupal.org and I can say the site is as user unfriendly as you are. Hopefully it will be redesigned soon. I did not read carefully the instructions, true, but I never expected that me, just a registered user, could have the capabilities of editing content.

About us, being or not professional, our work shows for itself. But from all you have posted, I can understand why such a great cms as drupal cannot have a more rapidly growing community.

This said, I am very sorry for any inconvenience caused.

I said I wasn't going to unblock the account again, and I haven't, but I don't mind going on record here to stick up for itemplater. Perhaps it's been a while since we were all Drupal newbs, but I can clearly see why itemplater might have thought that instruction node was a template and why that sentence should read, "To do that, add to this page a link to your post and a time...". Not knowing what scheduling means, that part is easy to gloss over. Moreover, his original "spammy" posts amounted to 1 per week, and while the pricing is a little strange, I think they look decent.

You don't need to "know Drupal" to make a Drupal theme and you shouldn't need to know significant PHP (scripting vs HTML separation is the intention right?). Drupal (the community) is low on theme developers and graphical creative designers - we have plenty of scripting people. Here is a themer introducing themselves, who has through this thread, on his own, exposed his Drupal frailties - that doesn't mean people have to pile on. I'm disappointed to see this amount of hostility for someone who clearly doesn't know what he's doing get an angry mob attack instead of a hand-holding. All we had to do to the graffiti, which I did, was revert the edited instruction node. Big whopping deal. Two clicks.

You guys even scared him out of re-posting his long post to the News and Announcements again (though I agree it has no chance of getting front page after all this). Now he's posting farewell stuff. Geez.

True enough, it looks like a bit of a pile -on.

BUT that's because it was a collection of different faux-pas that annoyed all us different ogres in different ways. I didn't notice the spamming, but react hostilely to a new user just placing an ad in the handbook - AND deleting existing content to do so.
I found they'd been given a warning before - and half blown it off with an attitude.
That's not on.

Now - if it had been a random newb that didn't know how to use an internet forum or a wiki - too bad. Ignorance can be forgiven.
But it was a commercial posting. So spamming gets punished.
Even that would be the end of it. Small harm, small penalty, life goes on.

But what grinds my gears is that this user has absolutely no knowledge of Drupal or Drupal.org - yet is attempting to market Drupal services. And that rates high on the BS meter. This pisses me off.
And despite never participating on D.O. thinks they are worthy of front page promotion out of nowhere. Fail.

The theme screenshots do actually look pretty good. If I hadn't been pissed off by the graffiti in the first case, and hadn't actually looked at the itemplater site in the second case, I would have been helpful and pointed out that Drupal Services would be the only reasonable place for such a self-promotion to be posted. But because of the above-mentioned problems (ignorance of Drupal and Nettiquette) and an additional ignorance of OSS and the GPL (as Greggles has pointed out) I don't think this company even comes close to meeting criteria for posting on that page.

I DID eventually look at the site and saw that their license is in violation of the GPL.
_{It can be argued that it's possible - with special work - to produce GPL-free Drupal themes, but it would seem unlikely that itemplater are even aware of their legal responsibilities there}

Themers don't have to "Know" Drupal PHP at all, true - but that's not the point. It's reasonable to expect they have a passing knowledge with using the interface or reading documentation.

At this point the only comeback for itemplaters reputation is for the actual itemplater developers (assuming that someone techy there is capable of building the themes they market) and apologize for letting a non-web-savvy intern try and do their internet marketing for them.

:-{

As usual, dman is spot on. The only thing i would add is that theme screenshots do not a good drupal theme make. I can make gorgeous screenshots of photoshop comps-- that's a far cry from a drupal theme. It's the coding behind themes that determine how good a drupal theme they are-- and i have to wonder how elegant the drupal code part of a theme could be if it's written by someone who barely knows drupal.org. That's what prompted my unprofessional comment.

That plus the fact there is no free sample code/theme to inspect + the no refund policy + complete lack of understanding of the GPL puts me off-- not something you want from a front page post, not even if the writeup was perfectly done.

it is not just screen shots... Every theme has its own live demonstration link where you can see how the theme looks. We have set up a demonstrations server.
Still I fail to understand, how does the programming, designing and coding skills have to do with using drupal.org
I have always been busy with projects, no time to learn drupal.org
i.e. submitting a free theme at the repository here it is a real pain.

i.e. submitting a free theme at the repository here it is a real pain.

It's also not allowed, if you're not providing GPL-licensed themes as noted above.

I think his acount and all follow-up-accounts should remain blocked. drupal.org is clearly better off without him.

I gotta admit - those look like pretty nice clean themes.
Not bad for the price at all!

thanks for your words, flattering after what you said above.
The themes are extremely clean, all are css & html valid. I do not know why you guys have this idea that drupal themes should be expensive. Drupal themes price should be the same as other cms themes prices.
We are selling them at the price they should be, and allow everybody get a good looking drupal theme at a good price. Oh yeah, drupal themes can look good...

It's about 10 days we have launched them, we have sold some of them, and until now we haven't had a single support requesting e-mail, simply because they are clean, a breeze to install and configure...

thanks for restoring the account, and sorry for the misunderstandings. Deffinitely will pay more attention to directions on how to interact with drupal.org

Cheers and Happy new year

I have been interested in Drupal for a number of years now. I appreciate the structure and thought put into its function.
What I have never been impressed with are the 'themes'

Somebody pointed it out earlier - he's not selling watches.

I think the templates look good - better than most.

He was aggressive perhaps but I do not think he would purposely bite the hand that feeds.

I am still a newbie, I did a few installs a few years back. Nothing recent - I am relearning somewhat.

I will try one of his themes and report back here as to whether or not it made my life 'easy' or 'hard'.

Please do not make life hard for themers --- the aesthetic is all that is lacking from making Drupal a hands down winner.

What's up with all the edits dated feb18th?

itemplater changed their account username to templ1