Background: An advert for piping lessons, and reedmaking services, by Adrian Schofield, in April 1998 prompted the following:

From: Colin Ross:
Should professionals use this facility for direct advertising? Isn't this what web pages are for.

From: Steve Meyer :
Yes, I believe web pages are the right place for commercial advertising. Besides, as we are being kindly hosted on this list by Dartmouth College, it is probably against their acceptable use guidelines to post such direct commercial appeals. I know that is the case for the University here.

From Wayne Cripps: (list manager)
It depends what you are advertising. A discrete ad for NSP once in a while is OK. An ad for discount magazines, cheap air fare, or pornography is definitely not acceptable.
Seeing as Northumbrian Smallpipes are hard to find, an ad for them comes more in the line of information than commercialization.
Dartmouth College has no objections to appropriate advertising on mail lists with private membership, like this list.

From: Richard + Anita Evans
Yes, I think that our common interest is such a restricted little world (although happily growing), that the type of advertising we are likely to see in this group would be regarded as useful and interesting by most of us. Small-scale adverts are commonplace in the 'uk folk. music' Usenet discussion group, where they are conventionally identified by the word 'ANNOUNCE' in the subject. If you don't want to read them it is obvious which postings to avoid.

From: Ian Lawther
Colin is right to say that web pages are the correct place for advertising, but sometimes it is necessary to put out a post to point people at the web page. However a simple look at http://www.xyz is going to be overlooked by most people.
I know there are people on the rec.music.makers.bagpipe list who post adverts with annoying regularity and I certainly don't want to do that. In this small cyber segment of the small NSP community I think one off announcements of recordings, availability for lessons, secondhand pipes for sale, or pointers to pipemakers home pages (as appeared recently in rec.music.makers.bagpipe for Mike Nelson's NSP plans) are of use to more people than they offend. To do it more often would become a nuisance, and again in this small group I'm sure miscreants will soon be jumped on.

From: Rob Say:
As far as usenet protocol and netiquette goes, signature files with website addresses in are deemed acceptable since they are saying something about the individual making the post.

From: Adrian Schofield:
Web pages are open to anyone on the web, this group isn't. Anyway-its a news group and what I have done is informed people (given them news) of how to get lessons etc.

The consensus is therefore that limited appropriate advertising is a useful service to a specialist interest group like ourselves. Web pages, however, remain the best medium for detailed commercial information.