Our anti-commercial posting policy is intended to keep Engineers Edge forums from becoming a spam-rama to commercial organizations. And believe me, if left un-checked this forum would be completely useless and full of high pressure spammers.

Engineers Edge is very fortunate to have many extremely knowledgeable regulars whom voluntarily assist individuals with their technical challenges. These individuals are randykimball, zekeman, swearington, maytag, devitg, scooter, traingdt, Zip, cragyon, and more (sorry if I missed you).

Unfortunately, we are constantly being visited by commercial operators whom have a very different view on how to use our Engineering forums.

The greatest challenge facing us:

There are companies and individuals whom specialize in spamming forums. This is all some of them do for a living. These "professional spammers" search the internet and find forums that are on topic to a customers needs and they carefully "spam" the forum to acquire link backs, company name dropping, and often direct URL dropping (links) to bring back customers.

Some of the techniques they use:
- Tag teams: One or more operators will start a conversation with each other to add credibility to a thread.
- Post count building: Often, operators will increase their post count, carefully contributing to the 'players' in a forum to increase "nick recognition", and then slowly introduce a topic.
- Classic Q & A with themselves. Forums that don't watch real close often have operators that carry on conversations with themselves under two different account logins.
- Name dropping campaigns: Often they just drop the name of a product or service with "what do you think of product Z". After awhile they come back and work in the URL (link) with some member saying, "oh yes, I've used them before, great company!"
- Profile building: I heard of a company that targets a particular industry that has two operators with over 50,000 posts around forums. With all that posting, those two operators are now considered "experts" in their topic area - and they are nothing more than salesmen.

Now, this may seem all cloak and dagger, however I can assure you this is real!

Just this week alone, we had a new poster "dhana" whom posted a question, and then created a new account under the name "nikitha" and answered the question with the recommendation that they go to a commercial website for help. They where actually using advanced high-tech methods to obscure what they where doing and who they where (which I will not go into here so I do not give others ideals). They even used their companies email address to register! It gets better, after we deleted their posting (all of them), they emailed and wanted to know why they where removed.

Ok, my rant is over...

In summary, our anti-commercial posting policy within Engineers Edge Engineering Forums is here to protect you and to keep our Engineering forum a valuable SPAM FREE solutions resource.

Please keep in mind the internet is also full of email collecting programs, so you never want to post your email address on any public internet location. We have protected your identity and email address using the best industry practices available.

If you are contacted by any commercial operators originating from Engineers Edge, PLEASE LET US KNOW!

Thanks!