Are commercial services abusing GIS.SE policies?

Question

This question is similar to Should we allow the site to become a support forum for a particular software?, although applies to commercial sites.

I have been noticing many poorly worded and duplicate questions from users funneled to GIS.SE from commercial services. For example, CartoDB is a thrill to use and an amazing WMS, although I am starting to think their method of directing questions to "community support" is inappropriate. After all, our GIS.SE help page states "We are not a GIS Software Support Site". Is the practice considered inappropriate, or perhaps worse--a violation of SE or GIS.SE policies?

Answer 1

I am glad this has been raised.

I note that none of the top 10 CartoDB answerers appear to be CartoDB employees - I did not look at the user cards of the rest.

I think we should feel flattered that GIS SE often seems to be the first point of call for help with commercial GIS software.

However, I think this means that we should expect a higher quality of question, so I recommend that we just be extra diligent about not being afraid to close or downvote any questions that seem not to understand from the Tour that "we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about geographic information systems" and to do that we need questions to be focused and clear.

Through ongoing curation (tagging, duplicates, titles, etc) we would expect the self-assembling list of Frequent questions on CartoDB to start to become as useful for people looking for duplicates as the Frequent questions on ArcGIS for Desktop.