John,
To me, that is not the way to look at it. Most members come to the forum to see what others are doing, get ideas, get issues fixed, etc. To be honest, how many members ignore the vendor posts? There is no way to tell, but I am one who never look at them, and I bet there are many more too. We have the Buy/Sell Forum for people who want to see what people are selling. Why should we let the Vendors do that in the regular forums, which were not intended for this when they were created, forcing people to skip their emails, just to get to what they want to see? If people are interested in sales, there should be one place for them to go instead of seeing the vendor posts on many different forums.
The purpose of the Forum is give a place for members and vendors. But Vendors should have a place to post their sales, etc. rather than in others.
When I go to 3-Rail Scale Model Trains, I don't want to see all but 3 posts all about Vendor sales/special runs. If I go to this Forum, I want to see posts about 3-Rail Scale. Looking at the Forums now, currently in the 3-rail Traditional Forum, 8 out of the 25 are vendors (32%). In the 3-Rail Scale Forum, 88% (22 of the 25) are Vendor Adds not to mention 80% on Page 2. How is this good business for members to have to browse posts when Vendor adds are clogging the Forum? Just to put in perspective, in the 3-Rale Scale, 2 pages = 50 posts. Only 8 of those are member posts/topics. The other 42 are vendor posts.
I'm in no way trying to bash Vendors or impact revenue to OGR, but continuing like this with no rules that allows this to happen really makes the forum not what it was intended for.
Put the vendor announcements in a new Forum just like Buy/Sell are so people can go there to see what's new, but leave the others what they were intended for. If members want to see the posts, they will. But don't force everyone to see the header when they don't want/need to.
