Vendor Policy and Commercial Posts

We'll have two types of vendors on our site, Supporting Vendors and non-supporting vendors. Supporting Vendors are the businesses who invest in our community and help us pay the costs of running this site in exchange for the opportunity to market their products/services to our members. Non-supporting vendors are the businesses who do not invest in our community and are not to post anything in our forums that would be seen as commercial or promotional. See a list of our Supporting Vendors here.

Supporting Vendors are granted special privileges because they support our community. They are able to discuss their products (pricing, availability, and list contact info) in the public forums where members are asking about their products or are discussing similar products. They also receive access to post special announcements in our Vendor Announcement Forum. We only choose vendors who we believe to be trustworthy to be on our Supporting Vendor list. Click here to find out how to become a Supporting Vendor.

All members who are not on our Supporting Vendors list are not to post anything in our forums that could be seen as promotional. This includes but is not limited to; new product announcements, pricing, availability, market feedback, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, URL's, links, group buys, etc. This applies to new threads, replies, signatures, private messages and emails on our site. They are not to reference their business, products or services anywhere on our site, including in their profile. The information will be removed and the member will be warned, suspended or banned depending on the severity or the repetitive nature of their violation. Unless you are a Supporting Vendor your posts should not reference any commercial content whatsoever. Our members should not be aware of the fact that you're a vendor at all by your participation on our site. The only situation where we're a little lenient on this policy is when manufacturers want to chime in on a thread where their products are being discussed and they attempt to clear up any misinformation. However, we don't allow non-supporting vendors to use our forums for customer support reasons.

Though we don't mind our members occasionally discussing non-supporting vendors, we may choose to remove contact info, links, URL's, etc, for that non-supporting vendor if we feel that there is any hint of spam or 'affiliate' promotion taking place. If we find a member posting repeated references to a non-supporting vendor or their products we tend to be suspicious. We also don't allow Group Buy threads in any forum except the Vendor Announcement forum, and they should only be posted by Supporting Vendors.

We no longer have a Vendor Reviews section, so we encourage people who want to share complaints about vendors to use Yelp or Google to share their complaints for vendors there. If you have a complaint about one of our Supporting Vendors, please also tell us about it separately. Don't start threads for the sole purpose of posting complaints or customer service issues about vendors in the forums. Product reviews are perfectly acceptable, and even encouraged in the Product Reviews section. Mentioning an issue you had with a vendor in a build thread happens from time to time, and that's acceptable, but keep it brief and don't attempt to use the forum as leverage to get back at the vendor. Dedicated vendor complaint threads are not allowed. Report all vendor complaint threads to our staff can handle the situation appropriately.