Coworking
The list is public, but gets a fair amount of spam, so is moderated by a few dedicated & friendly community members. Sometimes it's a day or two (or three - eek!) before one of us goes in to do that. So what are we looking for?
Obvious spam - None of us need to see any more spam messages about watches, car insurance, or that little blue pill that rhymes with Niagara (even if I type it I fear it will attract more spam), so we delete and ban those automatically. Sales emails and promotions generally get rejected.
Real messages from new people - These are awesome, and we allow them to go through and when we know the messages are from a real coworking person, we allow future messages to automatically be posted without being moderated. However sometimes an existing member who has posted here several times before gets caught by Google's spam. We do our best to catch these.
Real messages from new people marketing their space to us - This one is tricky, but it's usually something along the lines of "We're a new coworking space in [city], and we'd love to have you sign up for a membership."
Note that the majority of the people on this list own or manage a coworking space. We're professional colleagues, not a target market, so chat with us instead of marketing to us.
Please introduce yourself by name, announce your space, and share your website link, but also tell us what is unique about their space, why they decided to start a coworking space, who some of their awesome founding members are and what they do. And then of course ask questions, ask for help, bounce ideas off of us, and help others.This is all meant to be very supportive guidance, and most people take it as such and post again with an awesome introduction.
"Linkspam" aka posts with little-to-no content besides a link. This has become a large % of the posts that we moderate, almost always from vendors or service providers. And this one is also tricky, since sometimes the links being shared can be valuable resources.
We want to encourage productive discussions, and an environment where coworking peers can help each other solve problems. So in general, we do encourage sharing! It's how we learn what's going on, and help each other. Sharing stuff you create is okay, so long as it's not the only thing you ever post. But "drive-by" promotion does NOT help the community, so please try to avoid it.
Our rule of thumb is that especially if it's your first post, we discourage posts that link off-list to products, services, and blog posts UNLESS the post offers value in the post contents first.Instead, we encourage you to join in the conversation, say hello, make an introduction, even share *other* people's stuff that you've found useful/helpful. Just remember to talk about how you used it, etc.
Other miscellaneous - Then there are other odd messages here and there, like a message from someone at a new coworking space asking if this is the right place to post messages, duplicate messages, messages asking if the first one got through (especially if the first one is still in the moderation queue), and requests to unsubscribe, etc. Those are all addressed directly depending on the message.
If you have any questions about the moderation process or why we do what we do, please ask!
