Why no more posting of links to sales in the Where Can I Find It thread?

[ScatmanCrothers]

Nothing? Not a single response from someone in the know?

Who was it declaring other vendors sale links unacceptable through the general staff account? Never expected this kind of shadiness from a place like this. I have an idea who it was and what they stand to gain from it, but I'll wait for them to speak up. Or for someone else to speak up and show me where I've completely misunderstood what's happened in that thread. A little honesty and/or transparency from what I believed to be a stand up group of mods and other affiliates of this site would be much appreciated. If there is some sort of disconnect from those guys and a lowly average poster like myself to the point that I'm not deserving of honest answers then I'd like to know that as well so I can be on my way. Thanks.

[JSantoro]

There's a metric assload of vendors mentioned in that thread that aren't site sponsors.

I'm one of the guys, of more than one, that goes through and cleans up the utter mess that our membership makes of that thread.

Since December of 2012, the ONLY things to be posted in that thread are 1) requests for supply source, and 2) responses providing links or other info leading to a supply source. What we GET are constant failures to follow simple instructions: OOS reports, questions about the vendors, questions about product features, questions about freaking delivery, ffs...

That thread pre-dates Sandy Hook, and was intended to provide a single point of reference within the center of gravity of the forum (AR General Discussion), where everybody could see it and (presuming literacy, always a gamble) understand what it was for. Following the Sandy Hook killings, the market exploded, and it was decided that they level and type of traffic in that thread was to be severely limited, BY THE REQUEST OF OUR MEMBERSHIP, so that a member could ask about supply-sourcing in a market where stocking sources were difficult to find, and have a reasonable chance of readily SEEING a response without having to sift through an inordinate amount of Sicilian grandmas cackling at each other over the village well.

1) Given the sheer amount of BS our membership keeps trying to shorhorn in there, despite and seemingly in direct defiance of publicly-posted instructions and reminders....members of ALL post-counts and join-dates, members that should KNOW better. The results being, we conduct massive and near-constant editing and pruning efforts to keep the info to what our membership requested. Our position is that WE SHOULDN'T HAVE TO.

If we wanna play a game of accusation/counter-accusation, consider this Occam's Razor/Heinlein's Razor possibility: yahoos who can't follow simple directions keep putting in crap and starting/conducting discussions in what has CLEARLY been identified as NOT A DISCUSSION THREAD. Mods keep having to hard-delete 20-30 odd posts at a bloody time, and inevitably end up checking the box on something that might not otherwise rate getting zapped because the one posting it just HAAAAAAD to but something besides a link and a simple description in that post, so it looks like every other piece of posting-because-I-can-not-because-I-have-something-worthwhile-to-contribute idiocy that legitimately needs to be tagged for the dumpster.

So.....STOP DOING THAT. If you're not doing that, encourage other members to stop doing that.

2) Now that the market has stabilized, what we've noted is a lot of non-sponsoring vendors THEMSELVES, and their Myrmidons, making active efforts to post in that thread and advertise without having an advertising agreement in place. That's a no-go, and always has been.

Point being, if your post disappeared, it was either done so in error....or (far, far more likely) it simply wasn't kosher.

I've had folks ping me to ask about things like this, within that thread, and I told them the same thing. They just had the class to NOT go chem-trail theory and start puling media-buzzwords like "transparency." Forum policies regarding advertisers/advertising are quite transparent, and that thread's peppered with posts where various mod staffers specifically define what was expected in that thread. Any outrage over any speculative lack of integrity on the part of the forum staff isn't clever reasoning on your part.....it's derived of the intellectual laziness common amongst the current everyday American citizenry, who can't be bothered to actually LOOK for anything, and must be spoon-fed their info, or get shrill when they're not being spoon-fed.

It's NO secret: this is privately-owned webspace, it has a business aspect to it (psst -- just like ALL internet forums that float advertisements, doy), and it is actively moderated. YOU do not own it, the owner(s) do, and WE are allowed use of it at the behest of somebody else. We also ALL agreed to abide by the rules set down at the time we registered for membership.

We, the staff, don't get paid a wooden nickel to do the work that we do to ensure the best possible signal:noise ratio we can (and we fail, often; people being people...). Part of that is making sure that those who think of themselves above or otherwise immune from the forum rules, or simply can't be bothered to read then ahead of time so that they know what they are and don't break them...have NO CHOICE but to stay within them.

If that's too great a burden to bear, then by all means, any and all may avail themselves of the vast array of options we all have on Al Gore's internet.