Rated X wrote:You bring up a very good point.
Ha ha, why is it I feel dirty when you agree with me on something in the context of a knock off discussion?
But seriously... I find Seibertron.com's anti-anything not officially licensed stance unsupportable and, since they themselves constantly break it, hypocritical. How often are the following front paged?
-Stories warning against knock-offs (and thus unintentionally promoting them)
-Press releases from retailers that, while selling official products, also contain promotions for tons of third party items as well. (And also many items not at all related to Transformers.)
-Reprolabels updates. (Don't get me wrong, I love Reprolabels! But official, they are not.)
For a website that claims to be all about only officially licensed products, that's a lot of non-official stuff that makes the front page.
If the "only officially licensed Transformers" ideal is so important to the powers that be here, any talk of Reprolabels should be off the front page and shunted off to the third party forum, and retailer press releases should be edited to only mention relevant products.
As for knock-offs, as I mentioned previously that is something of a double edged sword. Collectors of the legitimate products need to be aware of them, after all. But such write-ups could be more limited... Perhaps just mention the product exists, and if possible what some ways to tell the real from the knock off is. And put a bold disclaimer against the buying of such products. I'd even go so far as to say they should avoid linking such news articles to discussion threads in the forum, so as to avoid anything on the front page connecting directly to things that might say, "I'm buying one!" or, "You can get_one_here for $42.64!" If someone starts a discussion thread separately, fine. But don't have it connected to a front page news article.