This is something that I felt as being totally wrong. Lets dissect it:

Traffic:
a) More traffic means more revenue for the forum.

b) More traffic means more visits which means more people joins the forum which means more (and better) content: this also leads us to a).

c) More traffic means more modders will come here to show their work which would also result in an increase of traffic which gets us to a).

So, what is my point? The better the modders, the better the traffic. Also, the better the modders, the better the companies will give stuff to those modders which, also, will mean that their mod will be even better.

So, all in all this is a chain that results in win win win win win for just everybody!

Then, what kind of reasons would make a forum start such nonsense rule? I really don't understand. Lets just check a bit this stuff: how many pages among all those written in here contain ads? 0.1%? 0.01%? Even less? Heck, many pages get hits just by posting the origin of that new/stuff/whatever, should we also ban those for being ads?

This, guys, is total nonsense. People that pay for the ads on the main-screen on this forum could not care less about the negligible quantity of ads that forum users post on their topics and worklogs (which are on page one, not on their sig and/or any of their posts...) because, as I pointed out, its that same sponsorship that makes the mods even better. Lets, for example, talk about this post:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...6&postcount=21

Do you think such a small mention will hurt anybody? Heck, such a piece of engineering has to cost quite a nice amount of money and I'm quite certain that craigbru will do a much better work with such machine that with his bare hands. So, where is the damage being done? Yea, if the forum was 100% about modding then I could understand it but, in an enthusiast forum such as this we are talking about all the products, does it matter whether they are given to us for free or not? People reviews products all the time..

IMO, there is nothing to discuss as what they are doing in that forum is plain wrong. If I had a sponsored build I would rather not post it rather than not naming the people that allowed (or made it easier) my build to be possible: and this is rather true just seeing that there are a lot less mods compared to here.