The problem with the product showcase is that it's the equivalent of watching the Home Shopping Network. It's wall-to-wall advertising.

The problem with the freebie forum is that it's mostly a repeat of what's in freestuff. When I have more free time, I'd rather visit Faeriewylde''s gifts forum to look for other freebies.

That's why I don't visit those two forums.

There's always a fine line between allowing the community to post about special sales and cool freebies they find versus disrupting the normal flow of conversations. There's also a fine line between moderation and over-moderation. Nobody wants to see this forum become overwhelmed by commercial posts. At the same time, there ought to be some room for forum members to talk about cool sales, freebies, and products in the forum. I couldn't say how much is too much. It's sort of like OT posts. I've seen forums overrun by posters that forgot what the subject of the forum was about and ruin the forum. OT topics are, to some degree allowed or tolerated in this forum. There are no absolute rules being applied to OT posts. If they start getting out of control, moderation becomes necessary. Maybe the same sort of fuzzy logic ought to be applied to posts about sales or freebies. The preference is to have hard and fast rules so that there is no question about what is allowed. That's not always possible.

This is a community forum for Poser. Poser is not a standalone product and relies on outside content, not provided by the program, to be fully useful. It's an awkward choice to not allow discussions of such content in the forum. Take that away and this becomes a tech support forum. Open up a Poser tech support forum and don't allow any tech issues to be posted here and this is going to be a fairly empty forum.

I don't want this forum to be overcrowded by commercial posts or freebie posts, but I like knowing about great sales and cool freebie finds. Right now, Poser users can buy Wardrobe Wizard for $30 (half price) because a store is offering a Black Friday 50% off coupon for an entire order. That store has never had that good a sale before, so it's news that ought to be allowed here. I wouldn't want to see constant posts about DAZ sales because there isn't a time when they don't have some kind of sale. Even with DAZ, every now and then they have a sale that's a lot better than their regular sales. I'd like to know about those because they tend to be very short duration sales.

I wish I could offer hard and fast rules about what ought to apply, but I can't. I've had to make those types of decisions in forums I moderate or used to moderate. I've found that I have to be unfair when I moderate a group because I apply a lighter hand moderating some community members than I do others. Some community members are better than others and I'm more liberal with productive members than I am with others that tend to be a little disruptive. I want to encourage and keep productive members. If such members have an off day where they make a questionable post, I'm more likely to leave their post than if it comes from a member that is a moderate nuisance. If a nuisance poster posts a similar message, I'll probably delete it. if the nuisance poster gets upset from moderation and leaves, I don't care. I don't like removing members who aren't outright violating rules, but there are some people with naturally abrasive personalities that I'm always on the borderline to delete. I will delete somebody whose first post is an ad or an attack on another member. There's no reason to be patient with everybody. I've found out the hard way that coddling an abrasive member only emboldens that person and allows that person to be overly disruptive in the group. I won't ever be a completely fair moderator. There isn't any reason to be completely fair. It's not entirely fair to ban a person with a personality disorder that they cannot always control. It's also not fair to allow a forum to be constantly disrupted by such people.

I'm becoming worried that moderation here is starting to hit a point where posts, that would be of benefit to the Poser community, are no longer allowed in the Poser forum. Things are getting bad when it's not appropriate to have a thread here about Christmas freebies. I understand that it's allowed in the freebie forum, but I rarely visit that forum. I like the one at Faeriewylde better. With the internet, it doesn't take me any more work to go to that freebie forum than it does to visit the one here. At the moment, the Poser forum here is the only one I visit daily. My preference is to find everything I want to read in this one forum. If the rules prevent me finding the information I want to see in this forum and I have to click elsewhere at Renderosity for that information, there's no guarantee I'll go to there. In most cases, I probably will go to another site. I can only speak for myself and my web surfing habits.

It's really important for the moderators here to pay attention to what members, like Acadia, are saying. Acadia is the kind of helpful person that any Poser community would be glad to have. It's not a good thing that she's getting frustrated with rules she doesn't like and going elsewhere to participate in another community that is more to her liking.

While I don't want this forum to be overly cluttered with ads and freebie notices, I'm not sure that I want it to just be a technical support forum. Being kept informed on what good content is out there, and the best prices and places to find them, is every bit as important as the technical aspects of Poser. It is impossible to do the best Poser artwork without being knowledgeable in both.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon