I never make personal attacks and in cases where people can confuse what im saying as if it were, i have no problem explaining what i meant or apologize for the misunderstanding.

But Renderosity seriously have to stop rolling out these rules or at least be willing to undo them when the community react to them as they have done with the last one. I wrote a private message to you the moment i saw this rule, trying to convince you to undo it, as nothing good would come out of it. I know that this is not your decision alone, so im not blaming you.

Several members including myself have posted suggestions to things you could do, some which doesn't even cost you anything and we have also given you a lot of reasons why this rule is so bad as it is. You know my background if you have read the post in the vendor forum and have seen others with similar background, arguing for why this rule is not good, yet it is met with silence in form of no counter arguments or explanations to why you would enforce a rule which have such effect on your community as it have/had. From what i could make out of the responses i got, is that it seems that a lot of these rules or idea, is made by people with an economic background and as long as their numbers add up on paper, its assumed that it probably reflect the real world as well, which then result in these weird rules being made, which doesn't have a positive effect on anything, simply because the initial assumptions of how things are related doesn't reflect reality, and then the moderators are left to clean up the mess.

My bet is that this rule was primarily, because it was assumed that a lot of sales or customer disappeared through third party links or if you could simply get everything posted here on Renderosity it would boost your sales. The reason why this would be possible was due to the assumption that you have a very large amount of free content already and therefore it would be no problem convincing or "forcing" the freebie creators to agree to this rule. However this is of course just my guess, so i might be wrong. The virus thing was either a complete misunderstanding of how the internet works or simply a way of trying to make a stronger arguement of why this rule was needed. I tend to believe its the last, at least i hope so.

But the community quickly destroyed the virus argument and I also think that me and another vendor have made a very good argument for why you need the freebie creators, probably more than they need you.

So again its extremely important i think, that you are a lot more careful when adding these rules, how you present them, but most of all if the rule is bad and the community is really against them and you have no arguments to defend them, admit it and simply roll them back, end of story.

And as already suggested to you, make a community group and pass your ideas through them before simply applying them, lots of people here are dedicated members and would love to give you feedback, before you simply apply them to your forum.

If you make a rule and you really think its good, be ready to defend it with good arguments of why they are needed and don't simply repeat the initial arguments, when people have already made them invalid and if you have no good arguments, roll back the rule. But of course try to avoid to much of this, because its very confusing, but its better than keeping a rule in place that no one likes are not beneficial and that you can't defend why is needed.