Okay, I don't condone anyone violating the rules. Lets put that out front. I however do want to discuss the rule and recommend that it be eliminated once you have reach a gold star or higher level. With 50 published posts you have shown that you know what type of materials that the sift expects.



The current self promotion rule is a bad idea with the best of intentions. In the world of free email services such as Yahoo or Gmail you can easily establish multiple untraceable video hosting accounts and then submit them using another identity on the sift. I have suspected self promotion more than once on sifted videos, but had no way to prove a link. So as it is currently situated the rule rewards less than honest people, while penalizing honest ones.



The sift already has the tools and the user base to deal with crappy videos. If they are not siftworthy, we can down vote them. If the video is over bounds of acceptability we can discard it. Why not allow the community to decide.



When the sift bans someone for whatever reason, it's a lost member, someone who could have subscribed, and/or submitted sift worthy content in the future. It is also lost advertising revenue.



Someone who re-hosts videos is left with four choices:

• Deny the videos to the sift community


• Create a sock puppet hosting account and upload them there before sifting them


• They could ask someone to submit them which would technically violate the current rule against self promotion


• Or they can create a sift talk post. Making them available for others to post and hoping someone sees it, and has enough interest and inclination to even look at the videos. This is the path I have chosen myself.

Lets take the current Fedquip situation. Yes he violated the rules as they are currently situated. As such he should certainly receive some form of reprimand for his transgression. In the end has the sift been harmed? The sift sifted his submissions and before they appeared on the site, we must have approved of them.



We trust the gold stars with so much already is establishing this as a gold star privilege something that will corrupt the sift? I really don't think so.