If you are talking about the For Sale/Trade thread, then I’d hardly call that censorship!!

Maybe if you had posted your thoughts here

http://www.ehx.com/forums/viewthread/392/

then you might have been able to persude Scott into looking into this again, anyway there’s your reason….nothing to do with censorship.

…although while we are on the subject ….. yes, if I feel that something someone has posted could be offensive to other people I may remove/edit it. If you are looking for an ‘anything goes’ forum this isn’t it.

Its not censorship. Its moderation. I was taking actions to keep your post within the rules of the forum. I think it was perfectly reasonable for me to do what I did, and I didn’t even delete your post. All I did was close it and take out the commercial spam in it. Commercial spam is not currently allowed on these forums, and if you can’t play by the rules, then go on ahead and leave.

fwiw, I should be clear about this too: I hope you stay.

But please also understand that we actually spent a lot of time talking about whether this should be a “commerce free zone” — and the decision was (again, subject to change) that we should.

So, commercial posts should be saved for other forums (unless we later enable them here) and I hope you continue to participate here.

There are people who agree with you, including some moderators. This issue isn’t so much over EH sales being hurt. Resale is an accepted part of the business, and if the resale market is healthy for a certain product, than the retail market for a product is probably pretty healthy too.

Personally, I’d like to have a SPAM thread, but I see a few reasons why not to allow it:

1. We don’t want people to get scammed here
2. We don’t want people to argue over deals here
3. While resale doesn’t necessarily hurt EH, I think if we allowed resale on the forums some EH retailers may have a gripe with it.
4. There are plenty of other places for that on the internet to buy and sell stuff
5. The forums is young- this one ties into the first two. Generally on other forums you’re selling to people who have been posting for years and you can trust.

At the same time there are reasons for it:

1. It helps foster a community
2. It attracts more people to the forums
3. It is a good market for EH products. If someone wants to sell their EH pedal, it would sell here. Which is nice.

I totally agree with everything Julian has just said.

Personally I would like to see a whole classifieds section on the forum, with ‘wanted’ ‘for sale’ ‘for trade’ ‘musicians wanted’ ‘Venues looking for bands’ ‘Bands looking for gigs’ etc etc and I think it would be a fantastic addition……but as Julian has outlined there are possible problems with doing this. (and many others that he hasn’t mentioned which the volunteer admin have discussed with EHX staff)

There’s always that grey area of where to draw the line and the admin decided at this time it’s easier to draw that line where it is. I think what you need to remember is this forum is linked to Electro Harmonix as a company by it’s name and nature….it’s not like other forums which are more of a seperate entity in their own right. What happens here reflects on the company good and bad….on other forums what happens only refects on the forum itself.

a little example

to use part of your post:

“I think we should be allowed to offer EHX pedals for sale as long as it is just private sales between forum members and not commercial sales in larger numbers.”

Firstly I don’t know who you are, you could be the owner of a guitar shop, trying to shift used gear that you have, where better to sell ehx stuff than to the fans on the forum….now I know that’s unlikely, but you could be ok?

Now we’ll call you ‘shop A’

‘Shop B’ gets wind of what you are doing, he has several EHX pedals in his shop so he puts them on here too as ‘good as new only used once’ even though they are brand new items, he offers them for $15 less than most shops.

‘Shop C’ gets wind of this, he is unhappy and feels that ‘Shop B’ is using the forum to undercut him in price, so contacts EHX to complain…..

as much as i would love another place for me to hunt down old rare EH pedals, i completely agree with all the above points. especially #3, it seems like a conflict of interest for EHX, because this is the official site forums. anyways, for-sale gear forums result in three unavoidable things: people getting ripped off, dealers posting constantly, and people over the top freaking out publicly over said purchases going wrong. there is absolutely no way to avoid it.