In reply to Jack Lasey.

To be clear, it is not just one theme that has been punished. Suspensions and so on happen all of the time behind the scenes for various reasons. Astra is simply a high-profile theme. The community interest made it newsworthy. If other themes are violating guidelines and reported, I am certain the team will address those specific themes.

Personally, I agree that affiliate links should be allowed if the theme supports or integrates with the plugin in some way. If the theme author is going to be recommending the plugin anyway, they should be able to make a few dollars through referrals.

I did ask the team reps whether they would consider reevaluating the affiliate links guideline. I used one quote from Carolina in the post but did not dive into what the other reps said. Because all of this did not get published in the post and I'm not likely to use it elsewhere, I will provide that part of the discussion here in the comments. Perhaps it will provide a bit more context.

Rep #1:

I wouldn't reevaluate the requirement, as mentioned at point 1, those two plugins did not have anything to do with the theme (design or function).

Rep #2:

Personal opinion: Regarding the evaluation of guidelines, Ideally we'd go through all of them one by one and rewrite them. Most of them exist because 1 or 2 bad actors took advantage of a system, and as a result of that everyone has a set of rules that apply to all.

It's not an ideal system, it's one that deters abuse of the .org repositories but doesn't necessarily help authors shine.

Rep #3:

The guideline forbids adding affiliate links or tracking of users without explicit consent of the user. There was no consent requested here nor were the affiliations noted/disclosed anywhere. That is a privacy concern in addition to stretching what the guidelines state.

We could reconsider the stance on affiliate links if certain privacy concerns were addressed but we have not discussed this.