Yes, I agree & thanks. This is a great suggestion.

Of course if crowd-funded symmetric painting is added to gimp main core, I imagine there will be no way to avoid crowd-funding talk and about endorsements even if there was a we do our part button every time time a new feature is added to gimp the issue of crowd-funding will be brought up and talks about new features may get derailed into talking about crowd-funding instead of the new feature.
to prevent any unnecessary debates taking over threads a crowd-funding topic may be needed to redirect those future discussions to and keep thread on track.

Crowd-Funding topics may be here to stay whether some prefer it's methods or not.

I think the main concern is with visitors whose sole purpose in coming here is to engage in promotion of their project or product. Regardless how worthy the project or how useful the product, it is not the purpose of this forum to provide a Litfass column for unsolicited announcements or drive-by promotional campaigns. There are plenty of other venues that invite such submissions or at least find them acceptable (Reddit, Slashdot, etc), but my humble recommendation is that the default policy of GIMP Chat find them to be generally unwelcome and unsuitable for the forum.

The staff members would of course have the prerogative of "overruling" the default policy if they feel the promotion is of cogent interest to the community, but if someone shows up with their first post announcing some new project then they should not feel put off if that post gets moderated -- even if the project is completely altruistic, above board, and worthwhile.

GIMP Chat policy should also recognize that there is within its community a general interest in sharing activities, concerns, and discoveries that mitigates against any prohibition of its established members making posts that might otherwise qualify under the preceding categories. This is not meant to be elitist but is merely the simple recognition that members of the GIMP Chat community care about each other, what they are doing, and what interests them. Also, by "established members" I do not mean that they have to have been here for years and have hundreds of posts; just that they joined the forum for the purpose of participating in the community, not merely as a one-off visit as part of a promotional campaign for an outside project.

I totally agree with your views Saulgoode... well said.

I think Saul perfectly articulated my concerns, as well as provided excellent policy guidelines for GC to follow.

Keeping this thread focused on what GC's policy should be, I've moved some of the pro/con crowdfunding posts made to this topic over to the other crowdfundng discussion thread.