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> Personally, I have never found advertisements to be a problem on any of the
> various scuba forums: rec.scuba, scuba-l, or techdiver (judging from the
> archives).  Indeed, I think more bandwidth is wasted discussing the odd
> advert and what our reaction to it should be.  The present thread is an
> instructive example.  Unless the situation changes remarkably for the worse,
> I say lighten up a bit.


Agreed!!!

All advertisements contain some amount of information and information presented
by 
a party with a commercial interest in the subject of the information, can also
be 
construed as an advertisement.   A procrustean decision to ban any form of
advertising 
will surely serve as a detriment to this forum by preventing the posting of
pertinent
commercial happenings and it will also remove the commercial entity, perhaps
the definitive 
source, from commenting on its product.  This is ludicrous in a sport as
equipment, 
training and information demanding as technical diving.

The TechDiver intro message reads "Readers of the TechDiver list have agreed
not to send 
messages of a blatant commercial nature to the list."  This is ideal because it
only permits 
the dissemination of relevant information.  However, it requires a judgement
call.  
Fortunately, I think we can do this with high degree of agreement.  The
occasional 
borderline case may bear reprimand and rebuttal but this serves to narrow the
borderline. 

Censoring "commercial" messages with a "COM" or ".com" to mollify the highly
sensitive few 
seems innocuous but realize that it means defining the term for posts which
already are 
not "of a blatant commercial nature".  If Tracey Baker's post about TDI was
"commercial" in nature 
even though she has no financial interest in TDI, than any product endorsement
or even
reference is also commercial.  Of relevance here is the information content of
the post.
News of the the formation of a new tech diving training agency is, in my
opinion, news worthy
of posting, even if the post came from TDI itself. 



Philip Weissman

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