Moderators have said most of the things that have to be said on the topic.
I just wanted to make a statement from the admin side.
why we take our time to respond?
cos we have some more important issues like keeping the site open to look at also. And they take a long time as we found out yesterday.
RIO said:
Admins, please add someone who has a business sense to your team - being a technology enthusiast and having a business sense are 2 very different things, and it's evident in this thread.
He's trying to help people here, something none of us are willing to do... work *with* him and not against him.
Rio, dude no offense but that is a rude post to make and not for the first time. What you might feel about an issue may not be how we feel. And just cos of that to say we lack "business sense" is quite a tall statement to make. To you a guy might be trying to help, maybe not to others. Respect opinions of others for a change. You can say what you want, being a bit polite is what we ask for.
superczar said:
Do keep in mind that most (almost all) of the mods and support staff are young college kids.....
I presume you have worked for a while and am sure you do know the difference between what comprises professional and non-professional behavior is not evident to college going folks! (and that isn't necessarily a bad thing....keeps things a little more chilled out...know what i mean
Ok so we are all college kids. :lol
ok wait you just said mods and support staff so thankfully admins missed out, hopefully not by oversight i hope
)
Assumptions you made: That being college kids makes people unprofessional. And a guy who has worked makes him professional. (oh luckily i would fall into the latter category that way)
I can safely say that i disagree with you completely. I have known and
worked with highly professional college and for that matter school kids. I guess you need to look around the internet a bit more. I am guessing you will be enlightened by how many professionally run sites are run by so called "kids".
Btw i will also not agree with you if you are implying that Katmandude has been behaving professionally. I would personally call it pretty un-professional behavior. Everyone of us can do things better. We can also and we acknowledge that fact. Things could have been done better by us but that certainly doesn't make us un-professional.
Time and again btw we keep getting the hints about TE making money. Let me (once again, i have lost count, this is not the first time i am sure) reiterate. TE was making a loss till 6 months back. To what extent, staff members know, we considered extreme steps also. I don't think we need to tell what steps in public. As far as people financing us go, our answer is a polite but firm no. TE has a history and our history has taught us not to accept donations or tieups however good the intentions. Its a principle we religiously follow and won't be changing. Profitability for us would have quite different meanings than to anyone else. Even now when we are profitable, the margins would be just enough to pay for net bills or keep them for renewals and data overusage on the server. We are pretty happy with that. We don't go out of the way to advertise or make money(which we have been offered in the past and as recently as in this thread). My idea of profitability for example would be some experience gained from running this site that maybe i can utilize somewhere else working.
Casting aspersions on us is the favorite pastime of some members here. Most of the time we don't bother. And this is the last time i sincerely hope i will be posting on that issue(although i said that last time too i remember)
And finally katmandude mate,
I will be very frank with you based solely on what you posted in this thread. You are an MBA and i am pretty sure that you appreciate the importance of having an initial kickstart. You wrote to us long time back about starting your own site on the model of newegg. I believe a moderator did even give you some tips on how to go about it. First of all lets not call starting a newegg in India social service.(or community service) Its not, you know it, i know it(By that reasoning almost no site is commercial, everyone is doing a service). You want to try out a business model and you want to see it succeed for your profits. You would rather see it profitable from day 1 but(and i am assuming you have seen how advertising and net works) its not gonna happen from day 1 so your profits won't start for some time. It will take word of mouth publicity, planning and designing for that to happen. We have got no problems to this point. Our problems begin now when you start thinking that a good way to begin the publicity campaign is via TechEnclave.
You post threads in market
watermarked.Here is what you said.
You may look at the watermarking as a form of advertising, but its not. The intent here is to protect my images (which took a lot of effort and time to click and edit) from being stolen. These images would be freely available to anyone on the internet and I don't want people copying them and using them.
Really. I think the very idea of a watermark is to tell the source site. If your intention is to protect images, then you can watermark with your name or even with TE's logo. Having a watermark of your site is very convenient. And lets not beat about the bush. Its plain marketing to get publicity for your site.
Now whats our problem? well our problem is pretty simple. We don't allow this. Here is another quote of yours
My goal....simply speaking is to be the newegg of India. This is how I am trying to help the community.
Our goal mate when we started was say
"to be the neowin of india"
I would think its a lofty goal to set. So if we are to follow your que, we could have created some threads on other sites(digit, neowin even) saying its all community service and start posting pictures watermarked with TE. You can argue that you are selling hardware(you have i noticed used the word non profit and helping the community instead, but the intention is to be successful in selling) but the point remains that it all comes under advertising your site. And you want to use this site as a shortcut to get that initial member base. We have been through it with TE and before that on many other sites btw. We know the importance of userbases. Plus you have a signup placed on the front page which is quite convenient also. You are trying to build a userbase for your site, As an e-commerce sites needs that to be successful. No problems. but then be prepared to advertise.
Now if we are to allow you, then why and what stops other dealers from coming over too. They are much more established and can at this moment run a newegg like store better(not discounting your business model, i haven't seen it, this is hypothetical). So we can have the same arguments from them too. At the end we will have every tom dealer on TE doing community service, getting the hits and having a gala time. I don't think we ever want TE market or as a whole to become dominated by dealers in the first place, plus we don't want to lose out on what makes TE different than other sites. We have put in hard work on TE and its natural for any site to protect the userbase from viral campaigning. You can go to any big site and the rules will be the same.
Cutting it all short, I believe joined by the whole staff, that what you ran was a viral marketing campaign. Its our leniency that we allowed it for as long as we did. I will also apologize to you if we didn't inform you about the thread deletion, we will take care next time. Sorry about that.
However this thing cannot go on. We are discussing within staff new measures and suggestions thrown in this thread. Please do not open new threads for sale any more till such time an announcement is made.
We can allow your present threads only under following conditions(
and no new threads)
1) You will remove all watermarks immediately. And no you will not use the images to be sent via pm's. Pm advertising is not allowed. Please post clean images(watermarked in your name on this forum if you want) on external image hosts.
2) Refrain from viral marketing. You have done enough and we are not allowing that any more. If we find any instance of deliberate advertising without prior permission or without purchasing an advertisement slot on TE, we will serve you a warning.
hyeah: 
