Advertising / Petitions

Hi everyone I’ve been completely snowed under with work and have only just started catching up on recent threads – a big thank you to the moderation team (Bill and Peter, assisted often by Paul and Karen) who keep things ticking over day after day. As Andrew and others noted, we decided to allow advertising some months ago, as long as it is birding-related and clearly identified as advertising. There hasn’t been a rush of commercial posts, mainly because the few people posting them have been respectful of the rest of this community. I would like to thank everyone for that. If you are running a trip, or have published a new guide, app, website or magazine, please feel free to let this part of the birding community know about it. If someone asks about a guide in a particular area, or a birding bookshop, or bird-friendly accommodation, etc then it’s appropriate to reply to the individual and/or the group (please put ADVERTISEMENT in your reply subject). Guides and others who post helpful information, or participate in discussions, and have something about their services in their message block are also acting within the guidelines of this forum. What I DON’T think is appropriate is someone posting frequently and prinicipally about their birding tours or services – there are plenty of other avenues for this. As I’ve often said in the past, if you don’t like a post, stop reading it and delete it. As always, discuss the topic and not the writer! Petitions: if they are about wild bird welfare, then by all means, inform the community via birding-aus. But I do agree that some of the very worthwhile crowdsourcing organisations like getup and change.org can get on one’s nerves a bit. I don’t sign many petitions, but I do find it a bit annoying that these sort of organisations bombard you with a lot of irrelevant causes. One more point: a number of people have kindly and generously offered to support birding-aus over the years, but so far I haven’t had to take up these offers. The costs are fairly small, and I’ve benefited in many, many ways – learning more, meeting lots of wonderful people online and in person, and many of these have been generous with their time and shown me around their local patch. I am grateful for all these kindnesses and hope to meet many more birding-aus members. Russell Woodford Ocean Grove Birding-Aus Founder