High quality "self promotion" allowable?

Question

Today I am seeing a lot of Late Answers coming in for review, all from the same user and referencing articles on https://www.mageplaza.com/

Usually those answers are very short and tell me to read more on the user's own blog. Normally I will flag these as "self promotion", but this time the answers are actually quite good, so I am marking these as "Looks OK".

Also I leave the reference (URL) in there as that is the original place of the content and could also help others with similar issues in their search.

Anyone care to share their opinion on this?

Answer 1

Links to personal blogs have a high chance to 404 in the future.

So, in my opinion, every answer should be read as if the links are already 404. Does the answer still answers the question?

This means that the link should be treated only as an extension to the answer, maybe an evironment to go deeper into the issue.

If the answer, by itself, without checking the link, is not an answer to your question, it just provides some quotes and blocks of text with missing info, then it is a bad answer and downvotable.

Of course, one should differentiate between links to personal blogs and links to the magento2 github repo.

Answer 2

Quote from: https://magento.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer

Provide context for links

Links to external resources are encouraged, but please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there. Always quote the most relevant part of an important link, in case the target site is unreachable or goes permanently offline.

Conclusion.
Single link answers are not the best answer.
Write a comment below one of the answers explaining why the OP should add more content to the answer.
If nothing happens by tomorrow, start flagging answers.

[EDIT]
If the answer is high quality, has context and not just a link and most probably solves the problem I see no problem with letting it be.
Although, if the answers keep recommending paid extensions over and over again I might need to summon the other mods.

As a general practice: Flag everything that looks fishy to you.

Answer 3

If the answers are still valuable without the link and just include it for further reference or as source, it's perfectly fine IMHO. If not, at least relevant parts of the source should be quoted.

(I've done that myself so who am I to judge)