Hi Bbjuzie,
I believe you should refrain from commenting further without understanding the reasons behind the forum's current restrictions.
When the forum started, it was opened to all to post in the marketplace and exchange corner. However, as the popularity of the forum increases, it also attracted the attention of business owners who uses the forum to promote and sell their products and services.
Please note that we are trying very hard to maintain the forum and make it remain free for genuine members to use the forum. We've server and bandwidth cost to pay. And once it exceeds a certain loading threshold, the cost of the next solution increases exponentially. We are talking about blade server, load balancing etc which we have not implemented as the cost is prohibitive.
There are daily 5000+ postings a day in the forum which really consumes a lot of resources which we are paying for. Therefore, it is unfair to us that there are people who abuses the forum's resources for their own commercial benefits. Many of them don't even bother to consider advertising with us and just make use of the "Want to Sell" and "Bulk Purchase" category for their benefits.
You can check with the many members who have been with us for a long period. You can even check some of our earlier messages in the announcement thread. We've tried many ways to stop the abuse but some of the business owners just keep coming back. We finally had no choice but to close the two categories to the public.
We would like to help too. But in order for us to continue to help, we must continue to have the resources (monetary, especially) to continue to help. So to prevent fraudulent abuse of our limited resources, we had to restrict. We don't have the luxury and liberty to waste our resources.
We have written rules, we have make announcements, we have put it in the categories headings, what else would you like us to do? When users know that they can't post in the restricted threads, shouldn't they have realise something is amiss?
If there were really a life-and-death situation and require our assistance, anyone could just write to us and we would be more than willing to help if we can.
Who likes to see multiple spams in the forum? Not us, obviously. If everyone is allowed to post multiple similar messages in the forum, our resources will be further strained. Just imagine, if everyone posts 2 same message every time, we would have 10,000+ postings in the forum a day! Can you begin to comprehend the amount of pressure and stress that we may be facing?
You are concern about your point of view but we need to balance the needs of more than 11,000+ members who have been active within the past year. I can't guarantee that we'll make the best decisions but we try to make the best decision that we can. If we made a bad decision, it is us who need to live with the consequences. If members do not like the forum here, they have a choice to visit other forums. But for us, we have no choice. We can't leave. We've poured our sweat, tears, blood, heart and soul into this project to make SingaporeMotherhood.com the best community available to genuine members who will support us.
This is our home. This is our pride. We know we can't please all but we are doing the best that we can, with whatever limited resources we have.
I would really appreciate your understanding. Thank you.
Regards,
Chin Leng.