Heya Bloodsong, in answer to your question: {{{{{1: i still have no clue what virus was talking about in the first post, here. what elite somebody or other is trying to kick everybody else outta the store???"}}}} A) Though I am not a mind reader, and therefore cannot be certain, I think it was in response to Vette's thread where she mentioned having heard of the guild effort of ours, and asked people's ideas and input about the Renderosity Merchants Guild seeming to mistakenly be believing some things about this guild effort, as effects Renderosity's little in house guild (which is NOT the guild we want to make, change, alter, or have anything to do with), inside the merchants forum... and maybe he feared that somehow this new guild controls in some way who can sell and who cannot, and whatever other fears he may have had. {{{{{2: somebody wants to start a poser artists' guild, and if you qualify as an artist that puts out high-quality items, you get a guild seal of approval. this guild is utterly independant of any forum and has nothing to do with any vendor venue. so why do the vendor venues care???}}}} A) Again, this is speculation. Maybe the vendor venues care because it is a wild card, not under their control. Therefore, a potential threat? I havent a clue. This guild idea is not something that would in any way prevent anyone from placing his products into the store anywhere, anywhere there is a store that will take them, no matter what review your products were given, bad or good. Bad reviews basically mean you might be aware you have some things to work on, and you can if you choose to do so. Since that information would be confidential, no one would even know anyone had "failed". Good reviews though no doubt, folks would want to shout from the rooftops and we would happily shout with you :) As to granting to personal friends and favorites, this is why in fact the double blind system needs to be instituted. One day Dmentia, Thorne and I faced the fact we might feel BAD if we ever had to give a bad review to a friend, and therefore get tempted to give them a good review. By having it be blind, who has tested, and as blind as possible who you are testing for, one can struggle to not fall prey to the granting the gold seal to personal friends and favorites. It is the best that can be done. We all have friends. We all have feelings. No one likes to hurt your friend. But we can recognize early on the temptations there, and steel ourselves for the battles ahead that each of us, internally, will face in time. As to why this has been a big secret... it is not :) But everything must start someplace. This started with a private talk between a few people, each of which prior to that talk had been somewhat acting as a vigilante in a way, trying to do something on their own about Quality... each in his own way. The common denominator in it is they all talked to me. I then began to try to focus them, get them thinking down the same paths, thinking less like vigilantes, and more focussing on how we can accomplish raising quality standards with an achievable set of goals by working together as an organized team... and thus grew the idea for a Guild. Thorne began the quality movement ... and I was willing to act as a conduit of communications since I know others who might feel the same way, and a way to keep narrowing the focus down to what the real goal was. So, for a period of time, when things were still being thought through, and make no mistake, they are STILL evolving and being thought through, by necessity it was private talks. When it became apparent to us that certain people on staff here felt so threatened by this that they might actually go so far as to wish to ban anyone involved (clearly they misunderstand the intent of the effort), we also have had to go deep deep underground too for a time. In these dangerous days, how else could it be? The goal though defined the intent. Going public, and going public as fast as we could manage to do so, soon as we had a legitimate goal and purpose and idea worked out. Much like in most things in life, for instance a cure for Cancer, you might not hear about it the second the chemist, and biochemist, and biologist put their heads together to compare notes and say, "by george, we may have something here... lets do a few experiments to see..." but make no mistake, the second they are fairly certain they have something, that same small fraternity of scientists would move to publish FAST... not only to share the wonderful news, but to establish credibility.