On May 17, 5:51 am, Michael Plant > wrote:
> On 05/16/2007 19:57:38 Alex > wrote:
>
> > Maybe it's time to revisit the group's charter... the current one is
> >> pretty minimal:
> >>http://pages.ripco.net/~c4ha2na9/tea/charter.html
> >> If there's agreement from the group, I think it might make sense to
> >> specifically limit commercial posts entirely, or at least clarify the
> >> policy on commercial posts, so that we don't have any ambiguity w/r/t
> >> posts like this, and the Art of Tea post.
> >> w
> > Charter or no charter, I think we can all agree that no one needs to get
> > their tea from anyone this unscrupulous.
>
> Alex,
> Did I miss something, or did
> a representative of this company
> answer that Adagio supplies them,
> and they therefore used Adagio's
> text to describe the tea supplied?
> That's not unscrupulous, I don't
> think, unless you refer to another
> episode of unscrupulousness. Of
> course this doesn't answer to the
> question of whether we ought to
> tolerate advertising here. On that
> I tend to agree with you, although
> a one shot ad doesn't offend me.
> I *don't* find the teas offered
> by this company particularly
> attractive.
> Michael

Very sorry to everyone - I missed that in the shuffle. That's really
embarassing. I still think the ad was intrusive, and having been
reading RFDT for about a year, I've come to find the chipper tone of
some of our occasional advertisers very grating. Having said that, I
don't object to commercial posting as long as it fits Mike's
guidelines, and I should add that I've found my primary suppliers
mainly through RFDT. If one of the regular posters started selling
tea or wrote a book or an article I would want to know about it, and I
would assume that they would let us know without being pushy, as I
think the Art of Tea person did. I strongly object to shilling,
stealing, and the practice of some vendors (teacuppa.com springs to
mind) of chiming in to unrelated discussions with pitches for their
product.