I was "on-line" in the days of the BBS, long before the internet, I'm also a time served Marine & Hydraulic engineer, and drifted into computers and IT having seen very early CAD stuff in the early eighties, before Microsoft released Windows 1.0

Around 2/3 years ago I purchased some excellent CNC toolpath generating software from a small, independent one man band, this software did 90% of what the multi thousand dollar "pro" packages did, which is 99% of what any hobby / light CNC shop would ever need, albeit at the cost of optimised toolpaths and therfore machine time.

I was an immediate convert to this software, and resolved to do everything I could to help the writer, which was quite a lot, given my background involvement in both the use and development of CAD/CAM/CAE/CNC software and hardware.

Unfortunately, this very busy one man band had decided to appoint two early customers of his as moderators on his forums, and as it happens both these people were USAians, which might at first not seem significant, but as owners of MB's know, there are significant differences between USA models and Euro models and Asia models etc.

Almost instantly, these two moderators were telling me that I was talking absolute crap, and giving me warnings etc.

To be sure, some of what they were saying had a basis in truth, if you were going to limit yourself to the USA CNC hobby CNC market only, if however, as the developer stated, he was looking at a world-wide market, and covering small / light industrial as well as hobby use, then these two moderators were talking absolute crap.

When I refused to kow-tow to these two, the next thing I know I am banned from the forums, and said forums constituted the support channel for the product which I had purchased and paid for, and cut me off from the updates which were part and parcel of what I purchased and paid for.

I complained to the man who wrote the software, he apologised profusely, but said that he was just too busy working on the software to manage the forums as well, and so he was grateful for the "assistance" of these two unpaid moderators.... he offered me a full refund, I said forget it.

My attitude was well, that's a bloody shame, but it is not a hardship as I have free licences for all the major pro packages anyway, they are a bit heavyweight for what I do at home, but what the hell.

So, one day a colleague asks me how I was getting along with this software, as I had been praising it, quite rightly, neat, sleek, small software package that ran adequately on any old PC, however low spec, and which did most of what anyone not doing CNC 24/7 commercially would ever need.

The colleague in question is with someone else who I had not met before, but who had just been introduced to me by name only.

I told them my tale of woe with the two moderators.

Right there, this small software company, a one man band with a genuinely excellent little product at a fantastic price, lost a 2,000 seat licence / sale, which, considering that his current user base was some 500 licences, was vast.

Even worse, this person was looking for a product to use in education / training, so it wasn't just 2,000 users lost, but 2,000 students every year who would have become familiar with the product and almost certainly purchased it themselves.

Even worse, this person was also acting as a consultant for a very well known internationally maker of home / hobby / light industrial CNC equipment, and his clients were looking to put together a software package to be supplied with all their kit, so many thousands of sales there too.

And all this because a man was so busy with what he saw as his "main revenue generating job" of actually writing the software, that he handed over effective control of PR for his rather excellent product to a couple of *******s who were prepared to "work" for free, in exchange for setting out their own private kingdom in the forums associated with the product.

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I myself have been building and running forums since the dawn of the WWW, and had already learned from the days of the BBS and Fidonet, that the cardinal rule when running a forum was this.

Never, ever, under any circumstances, allow anyone who wants to be a forum moderator anywhere near forum moderation.

Instead, give the job, under duress, press it upon them, to a succession of people who absolutely do not want the job, for one year each.

The corollary is never allow anyone who wants to be President to hold that office.

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I have been doing e-commerce since the early nineties, when you had to write the unique code for each site in cgi-perl, and submit it to the coders in the bank whose systems you wanted to talk to to enable the online credit card transaction, so that they could scrutinise it and authorise it.

In all that time, nobody has ever come up with a metric to measure the number of people who find your on-line business, like the product, like the price, but who do not make a purchase.

I live in the UK, so the commercial side of PP is as much use to me as tits on a bull, I can buy any pattern part for any merc cheaply at any one of two shops within 5 miles of here, plus OEM from the major regional MB shop 3 miles away, where I always get 40% discount, or a merc specialist used parts dealer who is 20 miles away.

I say this because I have no axe to grind, it makes no difference to me if the commercial side of PP makes a sale or not.

I have also quite deliberately not mentioned any names or any pack drill in any way related to PP in this post.

It isn't even specifically aimed at PP, rather it is inclusive, as many readers will also be involved in on-line e-commerce to some degree or another.

It is instead a cautionary tale for all, that bold red text above says it all.