The policy itself isn't so harsh, if it were put in with some foresight and forethought - Tim Choate came down and said that merchants who worked at other stores (not multi-store merchants, but merchants who were admins of other brokerages, say) would be denied access to the merchants' private forum. Okay, but consider this - they also said that these "competitors" would still have their stores in place. Now, this is where I got angry at it... some merchants were being treated as second-class citizens here, suddenly. Also, Tim claimed that these guys would "leak trade secrets" (which is almost a direct quote), yet the merchants' forum contains absolutely no trade secrets at all. Then Tim claims that Mehndi and Co. were only going to post things that would destroy R'osity and mislead merchants. When challenged to come up with proof, there was none. Meanwhile, Mehndi and Paul (Entropic) get banned, and Paul was banned before he could even clear out his gallery (which at last check was still up...) With every "explanation", Tim kept throwing out mroe and more obfusation. I really don't want to drag this out any further, so perhaps you can read for yourself at the FN&TC forum, where I announce my store closing. IMHO, if R'osity wants to be a community, I'm more than happy to participate as charitably as humanly possible. OTOH, if, as is intimated, Tim wants Renderosity to be a cut-throat business along the lines of Microsoft, then so be it - I refuse to play the charade, and will take my assistance (and money) elsewhere. /P