I'm tweaking the wording of one of the guidelines in our Member Handbook, which pertains to the #introduce-yourself channel. Old:

Please, no links to startups or companies, unless the link points to something deeply technical, philosophical, or otherwise interesting for us to talk about.

New:

Don't use this channel to talk about a startup or company. We want to learn about you as a person. If all your Future of Coding-relevant work happens to be taking place within a startup, talk about the nature of the work, not just the name and nature of the startup. Rather than linking to the startup homepage, link to a blog post or technical document that describes something interesting about what you're working on.

Our community moderators are very sensitive to posts in this channel that feel even slightly like spam. The mods may delete your post and message you about it. They'll encourage you to post again, and help you rewrite your introduction to be more appropriate for our audience.

Feedback welcome.

unrelated feedback, I think it’s worth adding a note to the handbook that all the messages in here are publicly synced & indexed. I’m not sure everyone knows this, or at least I was thrown off / surprised by this myself! Because I’m sure I’ve said things that were critical that I didn’t think would be public

Good thought. That's made clear in the Code of Conduct, but not the handbook. Perhaps those documents should be merged (or at least transcluded)

Whoops, my bad on company links in my intro this morning. I confess I tried to pattern match previous posts rather than seek out guidelines. Editing now.

@Patrick Flor — Thanks for making those edits to your post. Your post was close to the line (IMO), but there have been several recent posts that were far enough across it that I had to step in. One such post led to a long argument with the poster (he tried to rules-lawyer his way into being allowed to post something really spammy), so I figured I should clarify the guidelines a bit.

In the interest of brevity, I don't know if you need the part after "The mods may..." . Messaging posters and helping them rewrite their posts is purely a courtesy, definitely not something anyone should expect and possibly not a service you should publicly commit to offering; that could end up being a lot of work for minimal benefit to the community, much less the mods themselves. And I feel that "mods may delete your post" should be understood. 🙃 OTOH explicitness is rarely a bad thing... I might know what you're talking about with the recent spammy post. If so: thanks for dealing with that. You're doing great as far as I can tell, and I appreciate it. :)

The thought is: I want to encourage people to not be worried about making a post, only for it to be deleted and that's the end of it. I want people to know that the mods here are so nice and friendly that they'll help you figure out how to speak to our community in a way that everyone can feel good about. Without the last bit, it sounds a bit... mean?

makes sense and I agree with what Ivan’s saying. I’m in some other communities where there’s anxiety to post b/c it feels like slaps on the wrist, instead of more like nudges

Fair. :)

Are these descriptions that can also make their way to the actual Slack channel description (in a tighter edit perhaps)? That's typically where I look for a quick glance at what it's for.

They're linked in the "channel topic", which appears at the top by the channel name in the desktop Slack client. I've also added a condensed version of the guidelines to the "channel description" in #introduce-yourself. (That description uses every permitted character. What's the point of having a "topic" and "description", both with super-tight character limits?!)