Yes. Mods can set what rules they will - their site. But I don't see the sense in allowing other commercial cabinet makers to tout their wares but not Mike.
I've refrained from addressing this publicly until now for various reasons. We welcome manufacturers participating on TalkBass, but they need to abide by a set of rules called the
'Commercial User Policy'. While Supporting Memberships help a great deal with the costs of running the site, they don't cover the whole nut. The rest comes from advertising, whether generic ads or targeted ads from musical equipment manufacturers, plus sponsored forums. The reason for the Commercial User Policy is because unrestricted posting by Commercial Users leads to paying advertisers asking "why am I paying for what I could get for free?". Without them, the site doesn't exist in this form.
So, we let CU's answer questions posed by members and they can respond in kind. They can't post promo material or unsolicited product announcements because that falls into that 'free advertising' category that leads to loss of ad revenue. The CU benefits at zero cost while TB suffers.
It's understood that first couple of times a CU might not be familiar with the rules or not 100% clear on the interpretation, so we cut them slack to start with - especially on borderline content. But at some point there have to start being consequences for breaking the CUP, just as there are consequences for regular users breaking rules like profanity, disrespect etc. As those repeat, they eventually lead to temporary bans (several) before a permanent site ban. Mike reached the point way beyond a permanent ban would have been in order, as has happened for other CU's. In previous vBulletin forum software, site ban was only real option. With the new software, there is the possibility of blocking specific members from specific threads. Faced with site ban or thread ban we took this thread ban route with Mike because he has a lot of knowledge to offer the community, and you can see he has continued to share that knowledge in other threads. He is also still free to read this thread and PM any members with questions. We felt this was a better option for everyone than site ban.
So, that's the reasoning I used - I was the one who implemented this after discussing with other mods / admins. You can disagree with our choice, that's your right. I'm happy to clarify anything that was unclear here as long as it doesn't get into Rule #5 territory.
If you see CU's breaking the CUP 'touting their wares' please use the report post button next to offending posts and we will investigate. Please don't think of it as being a narc, think of it as helping to maintain a level playing field. There are thousands of posts on TB per day, mods can't read them all so we rely a great deal on reported content from users. This applies for all TB rules, not just the CUP.
I know the answer to the above, but I will refrain from posting it here. Mike may share it if u call and chat with him personally.
I'm pretty sure I know what Mike will tell you is the reason, because he's told a number of people the same thing who have then told it to me enough times to me for me to have this certainty. He has told people we were under pressure from specific manufacturers, positioning it as a 'big guy vs little guy' thing. He's wrong. The reason is 100% what I just described above, enforcement of the commercial user policy, anything else is supposition with no factual backing. The mods couldn't tell you who the paying advertisers are, I couldn't either most of the time - we deliberately keep it that way to avoid possibility of that type of scenario, whether consciously or unconsciously.
