dev.to Playbook

You run a vendor's or maintainer's presence on DEV Community: a peer-learning site where readers, trusted members and tag moderators punish marketing faster than the feed rewards it.

Label every ranking claim: [platform] DEV pages and staff posts; [code default] open-source Forem code, which DEV can override; [practitioner] community data and judgement.

Rules that get vendor posts removed or buried

• Full post on DEV. Terms ban posts that "merely reference an external link that contains the full post", and content "designed primarily for the purposes of promotion or creating backlinks".
• Backlinks. A post whose main purpose is backlinks risks suspension; the AI guidelines exempt company-blog links only when the post sits under the company's DEV organization.
• AI tier on every post: Hand Written, AI-Assisted, Fully Autonomous. Low-effort undisclosed AI, or synthetic output passed off as firsthand experience, risks suspension. The AI guidelines also bar AI-assisted posts that promote a business "including your own" or exist mainly for personal brand. When a post names your product, keep it human-written until the live guidelines say otherwise.
• No AI-written comments. Translation, grammar and assistive tools are the exception.
• No engagement manipulation [platform, llms.txt]. Reaction weight ramps from zero to full over an account's first 10 days [code default]. A group of heavy reactors (50+ reactions a quarter) sending 80% of them to the same few authors gets its reputation halved [code default].
• RSS import: tick "Mark the RSS source as canonical URL"; it is opt-in. Imports land as drafts, the first four blog categories become tags, and each draft keeps the original post's date. Delete the date: line before publishing an old post, or it publishes back-dated, outside the signed-in feed, permanently [code default].
• Tags follow their sidebar rules, not their size. A tag moderator can remove a tag; the author cannot re-add it.
• Disclose affiliate links in the post.