Hi,
Yes I was banned from a forum, for accusing a reel reviewer of another product of being paid for it.
Mainly because I took on some feedback from his review of my product in 2007, where after I spoke regularly to him about changes in the pipeline of upcoming models.
At the same time an individual asked him via email if he thought he should distribute my product in Tasmania, His answer was very contradictory to the conversations I had with the same person via email.
I then read an internet review that this guy did on another brand product, which co-incided with other media formats, the review was such an outright ad, I nearly wet myself.
So with a certain amount of distrust I accused him flat out of being paid for his internet review, and subsequently the post kept getting removed by the forum.
There was no foul language or derogatory comments, just listed facts.
Then I accused the forum host of the same bias, and questioned why they would not respond to my advertising enquirey within the forum a year earlier, As well as a right of reply, Hey presto I got banned.
As for busting people for posting BS comments on other forums, the links have been posted on this forum allready by Jeff Aldrin , who by the way I have no idea who he is.
Why do you assume I would ? Or have you realised that how vulnerable forums are for the abilty for propoganda to be too easily inserted, as it is an anonymous media arena.
Anyway I wouldn't do that because quite simply it's illegal to missrepresent a business for financial gain, massive fines and possible Jail terms.
So for all the floors associated with annonymous discussion forums, wher I once relied on for product developement feedback, I no longer do because I have learnt it is too easy to BS on bothe positive and negative, Now I rely soley on direct customer feedback for future design, and occasionaly look at forums to see any possible links to back up any improvements in discussion.
(Taken with a grain of salt)
So as a result of combining all available feedback, design and infrastructure moves forward based on all parts of the puzzle, it's called lateral thinking and something I was fortunate enough to be cursed with.
So in my opinion it is best to let the products speak for themselves, and go Fishing.
To breifly elaborate on Chinese copies, it's not that simple. R+D is currently shared with contractors, so some parts are sold on, for example there are alot of internal components of many brands that are shared between various brands and then use different bodies, hence you will see alot of asian made reels with the same gear ratio etc.
So you will see almost identical looking products that also have different internal parts, which is all about to change to remove any confusion about who made what.
There are so many differnet processes that do not occur in a chinese made reel, such as ultra sonic deburing of parts, which is how you bulk batch debur small metal parts at a reasonable cost, in china there is no such thing (cost too much)
The result of that is very ugly in terms of wear time of metal mating parts, not to mention a process I have seen in debugging involved using lapping paste instead of grease to wear in the oversized parts, and left in the reels.
If you don't know what lapping paste is it feel like grease with glass in it, it's used for grinding in valves on car cylinder heads, which is fine if it and the metal particals are removed once the lapping is finished, and that's 1 in a 1000 issues associated with possible quality issues.
as for engineering in fishing tackle industry, I don't think there is many that get involved in fishing as a sport it's self, I know countless engineering projects , where the design engineers have the design skill but know nothing about all the design criteria from a broad lateral view of every possibility of product use.
And that's where I usually get called in, because I can see the end result of an idea before it even starts in a mechanical sense.
If i get time I'll dig out a project that might elaborate on this, and has nothing to do with fishing.
And this is not about blowing my own trumpet, it's a desire to be challenged by offering information that someone might read and genuinely compete.
Simon
