Magnus3x summed it up. But I think FB's point wasn't about drive-by spammers... and I agree. People have a tendency to label posts spam when it's undeserved. If someone makes a post asking, "What's a good free host for my thumbnail galleries?" and one of the replies (by a regular contributor) is "I can hook you up. Message me on ICQ or go to my url at ... " ... well, that's hardly spam.
And when a regular contributor makes an announcement that their affiliate program has raised payouts, that's probably useful and relevant information.
But in either case, I believe the right to make announcements should be earned. We have a couple of people on our board who really irritate us. One guy comes and searches for every topic relevent to his service (skipping some great conversations), and replies only with, "Well, try my service." Another guy is someone who I've done a bit of business with and thought had good sense, yet he comes to our board and only makes announcements (and he actually runs a popular board of his own, which makes things even worse, since he should know better... sorry, won't name him). They're legitimate announcements, but eventually we started deleting them, after asking him three times to contribute to some other threads.
Just use some sense.
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