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To me the issue isn't "it's SPAM", which is axiomatic and not the real problem. Now and then I see a mage give a long speech as a table is being dropped. It's like 3 lines and not a big deal because it's so infrequent. I don't know what mod is doing it but if it blatantly told me the name and url then it'd be a problem.
When a mod blatantly advertises itself to a chat channel it turns its users into advocates doing the word of mouth the mod should earn on its own right. It's disturbingly evil if it requires the user to do it with no option.
It creates a currency for attention. It creates and props up a market to whore for money/donations, ego or (worse) no reason at all.
If it becomes accepted then it will cease to be an option as addons vie for attention and pay-to-use mods will increase as it becomes an actual form of marketing. People won't know or care their mods are advertising because outgoing spam will be surpressed for the user. Opt-outs if they exist will be buried in nested dropdown menus not worth the effort to find. Chat will be a mess for everyone.
It would impede the healthy exchange of ideas and code as those ideas and code get a market value and people try to make an imaginary (or real) buck off other people's work.
People like to believe they are addon-savvy enough to pick the "best" of every mod and most will go on the defensive for something that doesn't need defending if they held back the ads.
It's ADVERTISEMENTS lol. Did anyone ever want more of them while playing? How are spam filtering mods to surpress these advertisements anyway? Will they become huge databases of compare strings?
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