Hi folks,
This thread has sparked some discussions within the community leadership team and council, which I will outline below.
We do absolutely accept that the links were shared in good faith to help folks in the community, however we do not want to set any precedents that could open the floodgates for less well intentioned companies trying to gain leads by sharing their trials and landing pages in the community.
Specifically about the post that was shared:
- The post above was unsolicited - it was not in response to someone asking how to test the latest version of Mautic earlier in a thread - which is quite a different situation and comes across as being much more about corporate promotion and lead generation than responding to a current need from someone in the community.
- The link shared has a heavily branded lead capture landing page which folks have to complete before checking out the latest version, which really does lean towards corporate lead capture being the intent (even if that was not the genuine intention, that’s how it comes across - why would a lead capture be needed if it was just to kick the tyres of a new community release?).
To the point of allowing people to take the latest version of Mautic for a test drive and that not being offered, it is actually really easy to check out the latest release of Mautic now that we have Gitpod. You can go to https://gitpod.io/# and add the URL to anything on GitHub (eg a pull request, a branch, a tag) to spin up an instance of that, for free - you just need a GitHub account.
For example https://gitpod.io/#https://github.com/mautic/mautic/releases/tag/4.4.1 will spin up a Mautic instance with this tag applied, the latest release (which you can always check at Releases · mautic/mautic · GitHub). So this functionality does already exist in the community, plus it is how we test PRs so it is in our interest to make folks aware of Gitpod, so that we can increase the awareness of just how easy it is to test PRs and help the community merge things faster.
Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that we want this community to be a place where folks come to learn, share and help each other, and to minimize the corporate influence on that.
Here’s what we are doing to address the discussions in this thread:
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Add a line in the unacceptable behavior section of our Code of Conduct which specifically calls out corporate promotions including trial/demo/landing page sharing, making it clear to all that this is not allowed except when specifically requested by a community member earlier in the thread - the PR to add this is here. We will communicate this change to the community when it is merged.
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Making it clearer how companies in our ecosystem can promote their products and services - for example, they can become a partner and promote on their partners page, post in the Commercial forum where there are opportunities relevant to community members (this forum has every post moderated), and can share plugins and themes in the third party plugins category.
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Look into ways that we can support Community Partners in showcasing their products and services in a way that does not detract from the community experience. This may also help us to grow our Community Partners - organizations who both financially contribute to Mautic, and who are practically contributing to help Mautic grow - which benefits the community greatly.
Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback both publicly in the thread and privately, it has been very helpful.
We hope that this makes it clearer for everyone in the community and that it helps to contribute toward making the Mautic Community a better place for all of us.