Atlassian Community online guidelines for Marketplace and Solution Partners

[#1]

[Last updated: February 2022]

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NEW: You must be Level 3 (Member) on community in order to request permissions

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Atlassian's partners are a vital part of our community and we want you to be active in it! The Atlassian Community team is dedicated to providing an equal platform to all partners. Here are some guidelines for how to do so effectively.

Note: We send warnings to partners who abuse these guidelines. Repeated violations may result in consequences including your article-writing permissions being removed, your account being suspended, or being reported to the Atlassian Marketplace team. 

Identify yourself as a partner: Make sure the user is aware you are affiliated with a partner company; for example, by placing the name of your company in your user name in {curly brackets} or -dashes- (note that regular brackets no longer work and have been automatically converted to dashes). If you are mentioning your own products or services, make sure you include wording to make it clear that you are affiliated with the company providing those products or services.

By requesting partner access, you will also receive a badge on your profile that will identify you as a partner.

No promotional language: Your posts and comments should not be for the sole purpose of promoting your products or brand.  The community is not an appropriate place to promote special pricing or discounts. We will remove posts that are promotional in nature and will flag users who do so. Repeat offenders may be removed from the community.  

No linking to your product site or blog: The community is a place of learning and connecting, not to promote or point people back to your products or your website. The exceptions are: 

• A user explicitly asks for information about your products or services
• You are mentioning your app as one possible solution to users
• You've written an article about a particular app and want to link the app in your article
• Your support documentation answers a user's question in depth and you want to refer them to it (note, please include a summary of the answer on the community as well. rather than just linking out without any context)
• You are promoting a webinar that adds community value (see more below)

No "read more" promo links: Posting a partial article with a "read more here" link in an effort to drive community traffic back to your own website or blog is against the rules. 

No spamming: Although you are welcome to offer your product as a solution when appropriate, this doesn't mean posting links everywhere that you can find.

No reposting: Content on the Atlassian Community is generated for the community and by the community. Do not republish content written by someone else; the content should come from you. Syndicated content from other sources will be removed. 

No featuring: Because of the way our permissions work, in order to give out permissions to edit articles, you may also see the ability to "feature" an article. This is intended for our internal content team only. Featuring your own articles may result in your losing article-writing permissions. 

No signatures: We don't use signature lines on community; adding a signature line (especially with a link in it) is not allowed, sorry! 

A word on necroposting: Aka, "raising threads from the dead." In general, avoid posting on old threads (six months or more old) or on already solved threads simply to promote your products. However, you may post on old threads in certain cases. The rules are:

• Your post must add value to the thread 

• Your post must be specific to the user you are responding to (no cutting and pasting content in multiple threads)

• For now, do not update more than 2 old posts per day; we may remove this cap if the process goes smoothly

• Think from the user’s perspective, and give a complete answer to the problem stated instead of only advertising one app or solution. In other words, make sure you discuss alternative solution paths.

• Include a marketplace search link rather than a link to a direct app as shown below. 

  • <Don’t only link to your app, but rather to the correct search terms in the Marketplace, like https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?query=issue+sync>

• For a more nuanced look at our necroposting guidelines and examples of how to do this well please read this post. 

No soliciting: It is not okay to email our users directly in an attempt to promote products, surveys, discounts, or apps. This activity will be reported to our marketplace team. 

No gaming the system: Do not engage in mass upvoting, sock puppeting, impersonating users, or any other unethical behavior. If you see any suspect behavior on a post, please alert the admin team. Note that this type of unethical behavior may result in a partner being removed from the program. 

Don't bash other partners: Per our community guidelines, the community should be a helpful and friendly place. Partners should help users and not bash other partners and products. The Atlassian Community is an open place where anyone can answer questions and participate in discussions. 

App discussions: Discussions about apps are acceptable in the Marketplace Apps & Integrations collection, and where relevant elsewhere. When recommending an app, always be aware that there may be other solutions to the problem that do not involve an app, and we want to give the community a chance to provide these solutions.  Ideally, the app would be presented as one of a number of possible solutions. That said, if your app could solve the customer's problem, you can step in and recommend the app.  

We recommend adding a link to the marketplace with the relevant search term that lists the top apps for that category, which directs to your app and other relevant apps. This will allow you to promote your app, but still point towards a more complete answer about the topic.

Make sure the user is aware you are affiliated with the app by mentioning that in the body of your post (they may not notice it in your username). For example, if you are recommending your Flurb app, you might say: "Please note that I’m one of the folks behind Flurb, there may be other solutions out there."

If you adhere to these guidelines and believe your post has been removed or flagged in error, reach out to us at community-managers@atlassian.com and let us know. 

Articles: Marketplace and Solution Partners now have the ability to request article-writing permission -- see how to request permissions below.

Content guidelines

When thinking about whether your content is right for the Atlassian Community, consider the 99/1 rule. Your content should be 99% practical information, and 1% promoting your product or service. We recommend that if Partners are reusing content from their own blog, they change it up a little bit to make it fresh for the Atlassian Community. (In short, think "How-to", not "Press release.")

Partners can choose to write two types of articles:

App- or solution-focused

Partners can write FAQs about their apps, tips and tricks on how to use them, or other documentation. These articles should stay in the Marketplace Apps & Integrations collection or the Solutions Partner group only.  

You can, however, create additional tags to organize this content – if you have an app called Flurb, for instance, you can use tags like flurb-app, flurb-jira, and flurb-confluence, and ask users to create content using your tags so all of your flurb-jira content (for example) can live in the same place. 

You can even generate links prepopulated with your tags and include them in your support experience. For example, this URL will create a question in the apps space automatically tagged with “flurb." You can change the URL parameters to pre-tag with any tag you like! 

General-interest

Partners can write general-interest articles about Atlassian products, Atlassian events, agile methodologies, etc. These should not mention apps, and so do not have to stay in the App Marketplace collection or the Solution Partners group.

When in doubt, keep your content to our dedicated spaces, the Marketplace Apps & Integrations collection and the Solutions Partner group. 

If partners are interested in becoming more broadly involved in community, perhaps even joining the Community Leaders program in the future, providing general help to our users and participating in community is a great way to get started. Learn more about the Community Leaders program here.

Webinars

Posts promoting webinars are acceptable under the following conditions:

1. The webinar is free and adds value to the community (is not strictly promotional)
2. The post about the webinar adds value to the community
3. You're either an approved partner or part of at Atlassian Product team and working in partnership with a partner
4. The post is only posted in the Marketplace Apps & Integrations collection and not cross-posted to product collections

When in doubt, please reach out to bsauer@atlassian.com. 

Case studies: If anyone is interested in working with Atlassian to write up a case study about yourself or your customers, our content manager @Bridget Sauer would love to hear from you. You can pitch your ideas directly to bsauer@atlassian.com.

Note: We send warnings to partners who abuse these guidelines. Repeated violations may result in consequences including your article-writing permissions being removed, your account being suspended, or being reported to the Atlassian Marketplace team. 

If you are an Atlassian partner and you have reviewed and agreed to these guidelines, and are a Level 3 or above, leave a comment below to request the Marketplace Partner or Solutions Partner role, badge, and permissions on community. 

Thanks for your participation in our community, and let me know below if you have any questions or feedback.

You may also be interested in our in-person guidelines and our events etiquette guidelines for partners. 

[saralie s_]

@Balázs Szakál _META-INF_  @yuliia_b__SaaSJet_ You should have the badge and be all set to write articles!

@Amelie Winkler [Appfire]  Thank you for for your interest in writing articles! We do ask that marketplace partnersmust beLevel 3 (Member) on community in order to request permissions. You can reach this level by logging in multiple times, liking content, starting at least one discussion, and participating in discussions!

[Amelie Winkler [Appfire]]

Ok, thanks @saralie s_ I'll work on getting my level 3 badge then :)

[Preston Dube]

Hello @Monique vdB

I work at Communardo Prdoucts. Could I please gain permission to write articles?

 Thank you in advance.

Regards,

Preston

[saralie s_]

@Karina S_ _Elements_ @Sean Manwarring _Izymes_ @Itai Katz -Swimm- @Zoriana Bogutska_Adaptavist_  @Balázs Szakál _META-INF_ You should have the badge and be all set to write articles!

@Preston Dube  Thank you for for your interest in writing articles! We do ask that marketplace partnersmust beLevel 3 (Member) on community in order to request permissions. You can reach this level by logging in multiple times, liking content, starting at least one discussion, and participating in discussions!

[saralie s_]

@Monika_Ciemiecka_Deviniti_Hexygen You should be all good to go! Please ensure that you have reviewed our guidelines listed above to its fullest extent!

[Kinga]

Hi, can I please get an article writing permission for SolDevelo? Thank you in advance.