The Global Moderators team has noticed that there have been frequent situations where people post links to outside sources for downloading commercial GPL extensions in their forum posts.
In an effort to protect and show our support for developers who release their products under the GPL license, as well as users of Joomla and third party extensions, we are putting in place a new rule that only allows people to post a link to the approved JED listing for the extension to which they are referring.
Links to any sources outside of the JED will be removed without notice from forum posts for the following reasons:
- We cannot check the sources for possible license violations
- While the JED team makes a great effort to maintain that all listed extensions in the JED are up to date and without security risks, we can't be sure that links posted in the forums to external sites are of the same high standard.
- Linking to one's own site in a forum post is against the forum rules regarding self promotion anyway, and should never be done.
The forum rules can be found here and the addition has been made as:
Only links to approved extension listings in the Joomla Extension Directory (JED) will be permitted. Links to extension downloads outside of the JED will be removed without notice.
EDIT: September 29, 2010: We have ammended the aforementioned rule to read as following:
Linking to extensions: If an extension (commercial or otherwise) is listed in the JED then the link from the forum must be to the approved JED listing only.
Please note this does not apply to extensions that are *not* listed in the JED. However, normal rules regarding links to owner's sites (self promotion) and warez sites will still apply as they always have.
Thank you all for your patience and thoughtful feedback.