I think what has happened is that canreef activity has really dropped off, especially by some of the longer term more experienced reefers. When the canreef "executive" decided to crack down on frequent coral sellers and ban all criticism of current sponsors, that put a lot of people off (including me). It was made pretty clear at the time, that sponsors were the priority, not the canreef users. I think that has backfired, and now sponsors are leaving because they can't justify the cost given the lower canreef activity.

I worked in retail my whole career, and it was an obvious given that the customer was always number 1, not the suppliers, sponsors or anyone else. And the canreef users are the customers in this case. Without them, sponsors won't exist. But that doesn't seem to be understood by some...

Thanks for sharing that link. I just browsed through all the suggestions for the site improvements.

This is when I started seeing a lot of drop off as well. They also removed the buy/sell posts from the main page, and put in the sponsor posts.

I hate to say it guys but a forum like this doesn't run for free. We get to enjoy a free platform while there are server costs, etc. I can totally understand why vendors are given some leeway.

I always hope that doesn't come at the "cost" of honest reviews and or excess censorship, but in the end it is the user that will dictate the format. If people don't like what's happening they simply stop coming to the site and using other outlets. It's up to the mods and Titus to decide what they can tolerate and what they can't, and I will never question them on this as it's their site, not ours.

I for one think that this has been done fairly well for the most part. I have encountered my share of paid vendor censorship, and while I was grumpy with it, I never claimed it was unfair. It's completely within their rights :)

I don't know how much people have been ordering from J&L as a result of their sponsorship here but they obviously crunched the numbers and no longer felt it was worth while. I get a chuckle at people saying "we spend so much money there, they must be making cash off of us". It's not a cheap membership to be a vendor here (depending on how you look at it I guess). Once you factor in the actual profit they make off of the sales, that's a lot of fish food they need to sell to break even.

Just my 2 cents :)

+1