I agree that we should only allow announcements from contributing members. This is a development community, not a marketing community. It's nice to see what the members have released, since it gives us a taste of what the members of the community have accomplished. However, ads from random people don't really add anything useful IMO.

I have to read this entire thread to know the communities overall thoughts. In the meantime, I am looking to see how to handle this from an admin view.

New users are called Nibbies. I'm trying to see if I can set it so they can't post to Announcements board. If they post 3 times elsewhere, hopefully in a dev board, they get promoted to normal member. Normal members can post everywhere.

I need to test this.