What I see as a negative with this type of post is the following:

• It's way off topic; has nothing to do with Perl.
• It was posted in PerlMonks Discussion, yet it's also off topic as a Monastery-oriented discussion. If it had a shread of hope of being on topic in any of the Monastery's sections, it would be the PerlNews area...but it's still off topic for that.
• It's advertising (with honest intentions, but still advertising). And not only is it advertising, but it's something entirely unrelated to Perl. What if I were to post an offer for free doggy biscuits?

The fact that you've got a few "takers" doesn't make it right. Look at spam, after all; it continues to exist because it has a small but sufficient proportion of effectiveness. Nevertheless, though spam is sometimes effective, it annoys 99% of its recipients. Unfortunately, that 1% is enough to dangle the carrot in front of spammers.

One of the things that I like about the monastery is that though we get the occasional off topic post, those occurrences are infrequent, and almost never involve advertising some service or product. One of the things I dislike about most of Usenet, email, the web in general, is that one has to sift through neck-deep rubbish to find the on-topic stuff. Please, I implore, don't bring that environment here, even if it's with sincere intent.

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