I'm issuing this as a courtesy notice for those of you who have seen fit to ignore our rules. If you have a signature link that contains a web address -- whether that is a live link back to your business website or whether you've made your business name a "dot com" e.g. "MartialWonders.Com" you are hereby asked to state your business name ONLY. No link. No .com.

The only business link I will authorize is in your profile under "Home Page".

Dealers, retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers need to understand that SFI is *NOT* a free promotional tool.

"But why is so-and-so allowed to?"

There are only TWO types of people we allow to do so:

EXEMPTIONS

1. Individual artisans. We were established primiarily as a conservation group that seeks to preserve the traditions of craftsmanship through INDIVIDUAL ARTISANS. This applies to INDIVIDUAL bladesmiths, polishers, scabbard makers, etc. -- i.e. people who do NOT have a big budget for advertising and have little to no marketing capabilities themselves. We ALLOW the "little guy" a chance to see his/her busienss survive against the mass production machine.

2. Honorary Educational Advisors. These are custom or individual makers who have taken their time to share of their knowledge and to help us in understanding the qualities and properties of authentically made swords. Such knowledge ranges from craftsmanship, heat treating, polishing, metallurgy, to the various methods of achieving good balance, durability, etc. This is hard-earned experience learned over decades, taught to us freely. We therefore honor them as *honorary* educational advisors.

"But why is so-and-so allowed to? They're a business. They're not an HEA or an artisan." Good question. Sometimes myopic moderator duties are difficult enough monitoring the content of posts that signature links are slightly beneath the visual threshhold. I say "myopic" because of the magnitude of content on this site.

I am therefore asking you all to kindly review our NO ADVERTISING policy on our rules page which is linked off of the Home of this site. Please note you clicked "I AGREE" to our policies. I am also asking you to remove your live links and ".com" extensions NOW. We are going to give you a week or two do to this before we start cracking down, and there will be bans after this courtesy warning. I do not like people ignoring our admin warnings and our Rules page because it is a direct insult to me and to those who have worked so hard to make this an environment in which individual artisans can flourish, and therefore selfish business promotion counters those efforts.

YOUR ADVERTISING NEEDS

We have not made SFI as advertiser friendly as many dealers and retailers would like. We offer Business Links off of our Links page but we recognize that businesses want to promote directly on the forums. While we will not allow that, we are exploring the possibility of banner link placements that will not detract from SFI's aesthetic look.