Thoughts on the new rules around haul posts and self-promotion?

I sell a little on the side, maybe a dozen stitched patches a month through my Etsy shop, so the pinned selling thread actually works in my favour. When sales posts were mixed into the feed I'd get maybe two or three people clicking through. Now the thread sits at the top all month and I honestly get more steady enquiries from it, even if the individual posts get buried. People who are actually shopping go looking there. The watermark rule stings a bit more for me though. Everything I make has my shop name stitched into the backing fabric, wich is different from the handle I post under, so I'd have to redo how I photograph my work or change one of them. I get why they want it, my photos got reposted to a Pinterest account last year with the watermark cropped off, but the fix feels like it punishes the wrong people.

On the hauls, I'll admit I'm glad. My feed was half plastic organisers full of DMC skeins at one point, and while I love a tidy rainbow of thread as much as anyone, I come here to see stitching. A photo of your finished piece with the floss you used laid out beside it tells me so much more than a sealed box ever could.

I land on the other side of the haul question, and I'll say why. When I joined I was stitching my first piece on a cheap wooden hoop with floss from a mixed grab bag, and I nearly quit posting because the feed was full of people showing off two hundred skeins of DMC arranged in rainbow order. Beautiful, sure, but it made me feel like I needed a big stash before my messy little attempts counted for anything. The finished and in-progress posts are where I actually learned something, because you can see the stitches, the fabric, the mistakes.

The watermark rule doesn't bother me either. I sign everything with a username I made up years ago anyway, so it costs me nothing. I can see how it stings if you've built a shop name and suddenly can't use it, and maybe the mods could allow both as long as one matches the account. On the selling thread, I'd just say give it a couple of months before judging. When my local guild tried something similar for our swap table, the first month felt dead and then people built a habit of checking it. Habits take a while. If the pinned post is genuinely empty by spring, that's the real test, not the first few weeks.

Been stitching for about 14 years now and the watermark rule is the one I'd flag. I sign everthing with my initials and the year in a corner of the design, tiny chain stitch, maybe half a centimetre tall. As far as I can tell that's fine since my initials match my username, but I bet someone at the mod table needs to spell out whether initials count as a watermark at all. If the rule only means big corner text stamps, say so, becasue half the confusion is people guessing what counts.

The haul rule bothered me at first untill I figured out a workaround. I bought a bunch of new colours last month and instead of posting the box, I started a piece using nothing but those skeins and posted the WIP. Got way more comments than a stash photo ever would, and it acutally forced me to use stuff I'd been hoarding. As for the watermark thing, I just stitch my username in the corner now, same thread as the background so it doesn't shout. Took ten minutes to change the habit. Does anyone know if the mods are accepting feedback on these rules or is it a done deal?

Update: tried the WIP trick someone suggested and posted my new skeins mid-stitch instead of as a stash shot, and yeah, way more comments than a flat photo of thread ever got. Also came around on the pinned selling thread after the patch seller explained how it actually keeps eyeballs on thier stuff all month. Rules are growing on me.