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Is it self promotion?

Our Code of Conduct discourages self-promotion, but definining self-promotion is somewhat of a grey area.

Don't spam the channels with links, or links to pages, for the purpose of monetization of user views and which provide no value to the community

If you think your own project provides value and interest to the community, you can sometimes share it anyway, even if you have a financial incentive for doing so.

Some pointers:

• If you're new to the community, people are going to be a lot less welcoming to even mild self-promotion. If they know who you are, they might be more welcoming of it. Think about why you are on ZATech. If you're primarily here because you heard it's a good place to reach South African tech professionals, you're probably spamming. If you're around to ask and answer questions, discuss things, etc and happen to do some self promotion on the side, it might be OK.
• Read the room: different channels will be accepting of different levels of self-promotion. For example, #developers is generally pretty anti any kind of self-promotion while #shameless-advertising is open to most kinds of self-promotion (though clear spam/scam messages are still not allowed). Channels like #startups are somewhere in between. Read the previous messages and get to know some of the more familiar faces before posting self-promotional stuff.
• Avoid cross-posting self-promotional stuff: sometimes people will post a question or link to a few different relevant channels. This is generally something to avoid anyway (as related channels will often have a big overlap in membership so you end up forcing many people to see the same thing more than once), but should always be avoided in cases where you are promoting something.
• Accept the feedback: if people tell you they are not interested, or ignore you, then accept that it was probably not interesting to our community.