comcomthe home page of the finishing industry ®
1). To provide a technical resource about industrial metal finishing.
2). To provide a place for people to enjoy the camaraderie of their peers.
3). To help our advertisers get business to reward them for making the site possible.
Our editorial standards attempt to balance those 3 purposes, and we hope they flow naturally enough from them so that you don't really need to read fineprint -- but here it is for reference :-)
a). Please don't ask us to remove your posting. It is part & parcel of the resource we are building. If your posting must be removed, we will certainly do so, but we may not do it cheerfully and you may be unwelcome to post in the future because it costs us time we'd rather spend on new letters, it drills holes in the site, and it insults those who took their time to respond.
b). We can't publish anonymous letters. Like letters to a newspaper, all inquiries and answers must be from real, identifiable individuals. We need your FULL name, e-mail address, city, state, & country. For your privacy, after a period of time we will be pleased to remove your last name though.
d). We don't require your company name. If you choose to include it, we usually don't print it unless your company is a supporting advertiser.
e).We don't print e-mail addresses or contact info. It has long been considered rude netiquette to hijack a public question because it disenfranchises the readers, arousing their curiousity then cutting them adrift unsatisfied. Second, it's impractical to maintain contact info over the years and across a quarter million inquiries & responses. Thirdly, our supporting advertisers bear the costs of the site, so non-advertisers should not be reaching out to the customers. Finally, it is impossible for us to stop harvesters from spidering our pages and spamming any e-mail addresses found there.
f). We don't print URLs except with rare exception. They are impossible to keep current across 50 thousand pages, and they send our advertisers' hard-won readers away to other sites. Instead, please directly answer the question here if you can.
g). About brand names and company names. Brand names are okay for consumer products but if you are looking for an industrial product or service, your inquiry will be published as an RFQ on our "Looking for a Jobshop" or "Looking for a Product or Service" page and our advertisers will contact you in private. This site is made possible by supporting advertisers; for a reader to recommend competitors' products or other finishing shops would be like sitting down to a complimentary dinner at Irene's Diner, and 'helping out' the waiting patrons by telling them the food is better at Theresa's :-)
h). We can't let consumer & student inquiries overwhelm our mission. Consumers & students are welcome to submit questions, but this site is about industrial metal finishing, so we print only those questions which are about metal finishing, non-repetitive, and interesting to our readers. Search the site before posting a consumer, hobbyist, or student question please, and add your question to an existing thread on that subject rather than starting duplicate threads.
i). We don't print "slams" of either products or people. Everyone is welcome to express their own opinion, and to disagree with others--but never to question their qualifications or post an ad hominem response!
j). This is about SHARING between peers, not wholesale transfer of technology to the third world or newbies! So we do not print overly broad questions, nor a continuing series of questions from people who continuously ask and never answer. Share and share alike.
k). Non-english postings and replies. Sorry, due to time constrains and other reasons we can only post in English.
l). Don't prowl for possible applications for your product or service. That is not camaraderie nor sharing. If your efforts are motivated by a desire to promote your product you should be a supporting advertiser.
l). We reserve the right to edit all inquiries and responses. In general we post the technical portions and discard the proprietary portions.
m). Finally, and perhaps most important of all --
Our readers are usually generous in helping, but:
So please--
Thanks! Please Post an inquiry!
