finishingcom

the home page of the finishing industry ®

EDITORIAL STANDARDS

The purpose of this website is:

1). To provide a technical resource about 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. We try to keep non-advertisers from commercially profitting from our advertisers' investment.

Our editorial standards balance those 3 needs, and we hope they flow naturally enough from them that you don't need to read the fine print -- but here it is for reference :-)

a). Please don't ask us to remove your posting if it has been answered. It is part & parcel of the resource we are building. Removing it drills holes in the site, and insults & wastes the time of those who responded. If your posting must be removed, we will certainly do so -- but you may be unwelcome to post in the future.

b). We can't publish anonymous letters. Like letters to a newspaper, all inquiries & answers must be from identifiable individuals. We need your FULL name, e-mail address, city, state, and 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. Please don't expect commercial profit from your posting unless you an advertiser.

e).We don't print e-mail addresses or contact info. It's long been considered rude netiquette to hijack a public question and take it private 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. Third, our supporting advertisers bear the costs of the site, so non-advertisers should not reach out to the potential customers.

f). We only print URLs with rare exception. They encourage people to post a link instead of an answer, and most links go bad quickly; they are impossible to keep current across 50 thousand pages, and send our advertisers' hard-won readers away to other sites.

g). About brand names and company names. If you're 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 is like accepting a free dinner at Irene's Diner, and 'helping out' the waiting patrons by telling them the food is cheaper or 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 focuses on industrial metal finishing, so we print only those questions which are about metal finishing, non-repetitive, and interesting to our readers. Please search the site before posting, and try to add your question to an existing thread on that subject rather than starting duplicative threads.

i). We don't print "slams" of products or people. Everyone is welcome to express their own opinion, and to disagree with others--but never to question their qualifications or to post an ad hominem response!

j). This is about SHARING, not the wholesale transfer of technology! Share and share alike.

k). Non-english postings and replies. Sorry, due to time constraints 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 and sharing; that's spamming. If you want to promote your product via this website 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 commercial portions.

m). Finally, and perhaps most important of all --

PLEASE POST YOUR ACTUAL SITUATION

Our readers are usually generous in helping, but:

• Nobody likes abstract flash-card quizzes.
• Nobody offers hard-earned knowledge in response to carefully guarded questions .
• Nobody wants to spend time without learning anything in exchange.
• Nobody is willing to spend 20 minutes thoughtfully answering a 5-second question.
• Nobody wants to answer a repetitive question for their umpteenth time.

So please--

• Say WHO you are, WHAT you and your company do, & WHY you want to know. Readers have a right to know what cause they will be advancing if they spend their time on your inquiry!
• Spend more time on your question than you expect people to spend on the answer.
• Tell us whether you're building a single pinhead-sized part or millions of truck bumpers.
• To foster a spirit of sharing & attract interest, tell people something they might not know. Don't say "my formula doesn't work, I need a new one"; say "my formula, which is so & so, gives us such & such a problem".
• To minimize boring repetition, don't say "I want to darken some brass"; say "My great-great-great aunt left me a brass-hinged trunk from her Mayflower voyage..."
• If possible, e-mail a photo or sketch to mooney@finishing.com for inclusion with your posting.

Thank you for your patience! Please Post an inquiry!