Community guidelines – rules on external links could be a lot clearer

Hi there – I finally figured out why, on occasion, some of my posts/comments to Thurrott articles would simply say “please read the community guidelines”.

Evidently, linking to an external site is a no-no…which finally displayed in the error-text today (after losing the comment I had drafted).

Anyway, taking a look at the Community Guidelines page, I didn’t see anything specifically forbidding linking to external content.

From an admin perspective, I can understand why that rule would make the site easier to manage, reducing the need for moderator cat and mouse to squash links to spam and scams and other bad stuff. Just would have been easier as a user if that policy was clear up front, I had no idea why my comments were refusing to post, I thought the site was broken!

(FWIW, I just was trying to point to a relevant Microsoft support article)