Commercial Advertising On This Forum

[Chris]

I just wanted to make this crystal clear.

We do not allow commercial advertising on the forums from Non Supporting Vendors. Any threads, postings, or shameless plugs placed by non supporting vendors will be either edited, removed or deleted, at our sole discretion.

Supporting Vendors and supporting members are indentified by the supporting member icon on their postings. Currently that include Randy "Wildman" Corson, Bob from Robert's Marine and Jeff from Premier Motorsports.

If you are currrently a non supporting vendor and are interested in using our forums for commercial purposes, the proper procedure is to contact us FIRST, BEFORE placing ads, listings, or making plugs etc.

If anyone knows of any vendors operating on the board disguising themselves as a private individual, I would encourage you to contact me via PM and let me know about this. I will then investigate any matters brought forward.

IF, someone is found to be masking or cloaking their identity for the purposes of using the forums for commercial purposes without the supporting vendor status, most likely that vendor will not be allowed to participate in the supporting vendor program EVER, and may also be banned from the forums.

If you are just a member of the board and are approached by a non-supporting vendor/salesperson who is masking their identity as a private seller, or attempting to circumvent the forum rules, whether that is via PM, email or on the board, I would encourage you as a buyer, to "weigh" the character of an individual who would operate in such a manner.

Thanks,

Chris

 

[onthehammer]

Apologies to everyone. I will sign up as a supporting member/dealer asap. Just trying to bring back performance boating as much as possible since it died off in our area a few years back. Absolutely great being able to sell what I love to do. Sorry Again.

 

[Chris]

Jeff,

No worries brother. I appreciate the fact you've contacted me regarding becoming a supporting vendor.

And just for clarity purposes, my post wasn't directed at your post per se.

We've actually had more than a few people show up over the last few weeks and start plugging their businesses and that's something we don't allow. If people in the industry want to join up and participate without promoting themselves commercially, that's great. But if they want utilize the forums for selling/promoting at that point they need to get approval.

The rationale is two fold.

A) I want to protect our current vendors who have supported the site. And I want to make sure our members know the official contact info for anyone selling on the board for commericial purposes. The last thing we want is someone sending money to some unscrupulous person.

B) We don't think a website that is mainly supported via the donations of it's members should be saddled with the bandwidth bill for a business person that shows up to make a profit. I figure if someone is going to monitize the site, then that person should be me. And that's not something I'm actively pursuing at this time. I suppose if the site continues to grow and the hosting bill continues to increase, a time might arrive where we might need to look for more sources of revenue to offset costs.

Hopefully that makes sense.