Junior, I don’t know what to say. Honestly, I’ve closed a few thread where someone is trying to make a buck by posting an ad for a business.
We’re in a tough economy and not only has my company laid off employee’s, my friends are now being let go. I understand that we need to pull together to ride out the financial downturn and I would love to help struggling business out but we’ve made a commitment to our current Vendors to give them advertising services (own forum, banners, group buys, etc) at son240sx.org. The fact that I closed/moderated his thread is well within reason to keep our current Vendors happy.
We’re the premier 240sx community for Southern Ontario, we have top notch vendors who satisfy each and every customer with professional service. We have thousands of registered users and we have users who exclusively come to SON to buy parts. Our vendors are visited, contacted and used by SON. We want to keep them happy as they add to the community.
Your buddy, krayzie94 can talk to Bing/Mike/Gautam to become a vendor, I PM’d him and let him what I did and why. He know’s to contact Bing or Mike to become a vendor and can explore if SON is a fit for his business.
For the most part, no harm done. I don’t think our current vendors would lose direct revenue by advertising a group buy on paint jobs because, you’re right, none of them are in that business. If your ad re-directed potential revenue away from, let’s say an SR swap, then yes, you did harm their business.
If you become a vendor, it’s up to you to market your product and pull business in off this site. We’ll provide banners, forums, group buys, etc. But, you have to make sure SON is the right fit for a body shop.
There’s too much on SON for one person to solely moderate. If I enforced every single rule, I’d have a third full time job. You have to understand, each one of the admins work full time and volunteer our free/spare time to run this website [read: none of us get paid.]
I can see your intentions are good but maybe you were a little over zealous. If you took your thought process one step further and put our current sponsors/vendors shoes on, I don’t think you would have made your group buy post without contacting an admin.
You opinion is welcome, same with Junior’s and anyone else. We setup the front desk so that people could express their concerns with SON.
How the community perceives you is none of my business. If you come off as unprofessional, that’s your problem, not mine.