I am part of TEE (Team Elite Evaluators), and we always try our best to stick within the guidelines and encourage and educate evaluators to help the community.

We wanted to know a guardian's opinion on our programs thread where members can post projects they have made every week and whoever has subscribed can get notified. We realize it gets a bit close to a voting ring, or advertisement, and we want to make sure we are allowed to do this and are within the guidelines.

Link here: https://www.khanacademy.org/computer-programming/team-elite-evaluators/5804368723279872?qa_expand_key=ag5zfmtoYW4tYWNhZGVteXJACxIIVXNlckRhdGEiHWthaWRfNjQxOTY1MjEwODEwMTYyNjg3MzU4MjI3DAsSCEZlZWRiYWNrGICA1piVmtALDA

First, I will talk about why we have it at all. We have it to encourage members to stick with our team which keeps them doing evaluations for the community. We all know it can be hard to continue evaluating with the masses of projects submitted daily and non-stop, and this thread may provide the encouragement for our members to keep going, sort of a perk for our members in return for their evaluations. We also love seeing all of the great projects that we can find from our members there that can get lost in the hot list.

You might consider it a voting ring, but we would like to disagree. We never ask anyone to vote up any of the projects shared there, nor do we require them to subscribe. If you look thoroughly through it you will notice that the votes there do not come close to how many active members we have, or even how many we know are subscribed to the thread.. That proves that we only vote up stuff we think deserves a vote.

You might also consider it an advertisement, and I believe your goal there is to prevent spam and bothersome pleads for votes (when talking about program advertisement). That also may fall under off-topic as well. But, we strive to avoid this. For one, no one has to subscribe there, and I believe nothing we really say encourages anyone to subscribe. We also limit the posts per person to once a week. It is also not off topic because this is again a perk for our members to encourage evaluating which is 100% relevant to our mission at TEE. I for one will say that the thread notifications are absolutely no bother to me.

On a related topic, we were made aware some time ago that posting another user's project was against the guidelines. Our aim when we did that was to inspire our own members (they have not completed all of the projects). It was also for when we are extremely proud of a student we have worked with and that we appreciate it. We want to share our stories of how TEE is making a difference, and why feedback is so important in evaluating. For example one of our members (Markarino) gave feedback on a make it rain project and the student went crazy with it! Adjustable wind, gravity, and snow/water. It was great! That student obviously deserved some recognition, and it demonstrated how feedback really can make a big impact on a student. Can we post projects like that? We would really love it if we could.

Please let me know what you think, thanks!