Guys - my main goal is to bring back the SENSE of community Well, this does the polar opposite. We keep saying this and you don't listen. One of the major reasons being that we can no longer help people find add-ons or freebies that they are looking for on the forums. And claiming that we can just give instructions does NOT cut it, because sometimes, the downloads cannot be found on a search engine, and some of us don't use Facebook, have blogs, etc.
Do you not understand how INCREDIBLY self-destructive this rule is? Right now, Rendo is the ONLY commercial Poser site who is banning offsite links. Your competition does not do this. It doesn't matter if Rendo or any other site did this in the past-- remember what happened to America Online, whose business failed because they refused to adapt to the competition, which offered increasingly better deals. Allowing off-site links in the past has ZERO to do with why Rendo is struggling. Renderosity is struggling because of the following things, which sadly are mostly out of your control (unless TPtB listen to you, sadly)

--Horrible site design to this day, site is slow to load even with a fast internet connection-- something that not everyone has to this day.

--Paltry sales which do not come anywhere close to matching those of competing sites (people have complained about this countless times) One of the keys to a successful business is looking at your competition, and trying to match it. Daz, RDNA, and Hivewire are all out competing you in deals.

--Prime is a shadow of its former self due to the new policy of no longer giving vendors 100% royalties for prime product purchases. The result is that non-backlog Prime products cost more than they used to, some as much as 10 dollars. Platinum Club is now several times better than Prime-- in the past, some people considered Prime to be as good or superior to Platinum Club.

These ones below are immutable because they are in the past. Any claims from you, me, or anyone else that these are unfair is completely irrelevant, because the fact is that they hurt consumer confidence and drove Freebie makers away-- whether they are being fair or not to do so does not change this fact.

--Loss of consumer confidence due to the credit hacking incident and failure of the staff to believe the customers.

--Loss of consumer confidence due to 2-3 years of disastrous site redesigns.

--The ridiculous gallery rules that rolled out during the last site redesign. This drove some of the freebie makers away. While the policy was changed a couple weeks later, the damage was already done.

--Took a long time for all of the previous gallery features to return-- some were only brought back a few weeks ago.