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AnthonyTsai
[PuristS]
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You obviously think we are singling you out but we're not

What you don't understand is that for all these years, we have given you extra leeway regarding linking offsite to your blog.  We have allowed you, and 2 others I believe, to continue posting offsite links, while we single out everyone else and automatically edit their links.  So you have always been given special treatment for all these years if you didn't realize it.

You may think your blog is non-commercial just because you have no banner ads on it; but in actuality, it is commercial in an indirect way and from your post above, it's not your intentional at all.  We have told you before that at times we get requests for references about you because these people have seen your photos on our site and then go to your blog to see your other pictures, and we've given positive recommendations to these individuals and they then contact you and hire you for photos.  So your blog does act in some way as a commercial portal since you do get revenue from it even though there are no banner ads or commercial sections on it.  I really do not care if you receive any revenue from your pictures because that is none of my business.  Either way, this entire paragraph is not something I wanted to post but u brought up this topic so I had to write this even though I do not see your blog as a threat or competition to PPro, and all of this has no bearing or importance on why we now enforce prohibiting offsite links.

I understand all the issues you raise but you don't seem to understand the issues I'm pointing out.  You've been given special permission to post links to your blog for all these years (even though it was a violation of forum guidelines), and we just simply are making things simple for the entire PPro team regarding enforcement of our guidelines.  At times, we get complaints "Why can't I post a link to my site or this other site, but you let this guy do it?"  It is only a waste of time for our team to have to always spend hours writing emails after emails explaining why, and our team no longer has the extra time and energy to do so anymore.

This is why the new policy regarding offsite links is now black and white, and we're not the only watch site to have this policy if you're wondering.  The problem here is that you want all your content to be controlled by you on your blog.  You won't post them directly on the site, and that's why you always post a link to ur blog.  SteveG, another well-known watch photographer who has a successful highly trafficked blog, just posts his images directly on here and understands our forum guidelines.  I don't see why can't do the same.

We've even offered you several times this year and last year to have your own featured blog here on the site, and each time you turned it down.  We worked with SteveG to incorporate suggestions he had regarding photo display on the site so the software platform doesn't auto shrink pictures which are too wide for your screen.  SteveG wasn't keen on the platform altering his images to make them smaller sized, so we accomodated him and made the necessary changes.  Our tech team was willing to work with you if you were to accept our featured blog offer.

You are free to share your content with the PuristS community.  We are not telling you to go away or purposely prohibiting you from sharing your content.  Making the decision to go away is your own decision, not mine or anyone else's.

The real matter on hand now is you need to decide if you want to change the usual way you are used to posting on our site.  You can still post pictures here using your own photo hosting, and delete the pictures from your photo hosting whenever you want your pictures removed.  The pictures won't show up in your post anymore.  So you still have full control of your content, so I really don't understand why you frown upon this.  Every other person who uses their own photo hosting such as Photobucket or ImageShack has full control of their pictures, so I don't see what the problem is or why you can't do the same as everybody else.

You've turned down our featured blog offers, and we tried to accomodate you so you don't have to worry about paying for bandwidth and photo hosting.  You're not asking for special treatment and want to be treated like everyone else and you are.  I'm not sure what else we can do, so whatever you decide to do, is up to you.  I don't know what else to say because I'm being 100% fair and reasonable.  I try to make everyone happy here but am unsure how to satisfy you without breaking any of the existing forum posting guidelines.

- Anthony