Can you seriously with a straight face say that you don’t think that Vorshlag is advertising in this forum? Seriously? Every picture has a Vorshlag tag in it, I read something the other day by them and the word “Vorshlag” was in every paragraph or description at least once. His avatar has the company logo in it. I see more from Vorshlag than most the other vendors combined. If I was Sam I would be pestering the powers that be to shut that down or make him a sponsor, one of the two.
Well here's the deal, "gmitch" ... and I call you "gmitch" because you don't use a real name in your posts/sig, so we don't know who you really are. Where you worked for so many years in suspension design and such. Which is funny - since I cannot even state where I work here, because I don't pay them money, but I've tried and they won't take it. So I have a joke about all of that in my signature.
We at "v_rshlag" (can I buy a vowel?) take a lot of pictures of products, projects, at races, of OEM parts, etc. We use them to help answer questions, to show how to install parts, or to show products we sell. People and businesses tend steal our pictures, and many even go so far as to
claim them as their own. A lot of vendors that compete with me on sales steal our pictures, text, and forum posts on various products. That doesn't make me all warm and fuzzy. So back in about 2002 I started "watermarking" our photos. And I put the company logo in the watermark which is EXTREMELY COMMON, and that isn't "advertising".
Take the picture above. Last week somebody on a BMW forum asked "who has the dimensions of an E36 front rotor?" They wanted to know the total thickness and the solid portion thickness, plus diameter. So I went out to the shop, found one, weighed it and took these measurements and pictures, put them together in that montage.
And watermarked it. Because if we're going to the trouble of answering a random tech question that we have no hope of getting a sale from, shouldn't we at least get the credit? I can guarantee you that picture will be linked to and used 100s of times in the future. We have 30K+ pictures on our photo gallery site, with some going back to the late 1980s. And we've watermarked all or most of them.
This way, if someone copies one of our pictures and reposts it, at least people know who shot that picture and we get some credit. Sometimes they crop out our watermark (like
Jalopnik did in this article yesterday on one of our pictures of the car in the article - which is a big no-no, and they have been contacted, and they
will fix this). Doing that is called
intellectual theft. It seems to boil down to you and Sam that have a hard time understanding that, but nobody else does. I also don't see you or Sam posting
almost any pictures but if or when either of you start doing that, I suggest water marking them.
Next, all of my Project Thread Updates are written elsewhere and posted on multiple forums. On many of those forums we are paying sponsors, the rest don't care, or don't have sponsors, or do but
ask us to post in their forums without paying. So I write them with some degree of freedom, and that often tends to sound sales-y. I try to not beat people over the head with "buy parts from Vorshlag" but it comes across that way. And sometimes we sell the same widget as another shop, but often we know more about that widget, or how it is installed, or what the limitations are of it, etc. So I try to point out when we have special knowledge of a particular part.
And then there's S197FORUM. Which requires forum sponsorship, and police that vigorously (of which I understand), but wouldn't take our money -
for some reason. We tried to become a sponsor before we started posting here, and were told no, but then encouraged to add our build thread and bring tech. I posted in the beginning of my build thread here months ago how I write our Project Thread Updates and if that won't fly, then the site owner can kick us out/ban us or take our money and let us be sponsors. I am not going to cater my project thread posts differently for one forum just because they won't take our money. If we do get banned here then readers can follow us to other forums that we post the same tech in.
Jason and I have have also stepped into some other threads (like this one) here to answer questions (sometimes about our products, which is fair to do) or give opinions or share tech knowledge. We often use our pictures to show what we're talking about. ALL of our pictures have been watermarked for the reasons stated above. If that gets us banned, then that is lame.
And do not assume the above comment means I have an issue with it in any way shape or form. He is a business owner, he should be selling every minute he isn’t sleeping. And while he’s sleeping he should be dreaming up more ways to sell. I applaud his efforts, that’s what it takes to succeed.
The landscape would look much different if he was not selling. His/their posts would look more like yours.
OK, well... ??? It seems you don't have an issue with me posting the way I do, but you keep insisting all of it is, according to you, blatant selling. I want to point out that some of the tech we bring is not selling, it is just tech. We do a lot of other threads where we have nothing to sell in them. I have a whole project thread on our Chump race car build, which has zero Vorshlag products on it. Its a PoS $500 Firebird we are building for some W2W fun. And we share a lot of tech along the way. That is the opposite of selling, because I'm sinking time and money into it for no chance whatsoever of sales from that, heh. We also had an all-volunteer build for a GRM $20XX Challenge car, also without the chance for "Sales". Even when that car sold for a record amount for a GRM Challenge winning entry, we still lost our shirts on that project because we had 1000+ man hours in that build. That project was just for fun, we shared a TON of knowledge there - that we knew or learned along the way.
So saying that all we do is sales is both inaccurate and unfair. You have only seen a tiny slice of our total volume of online posts if you have only seen us in the S197Forum. We've been active on dozens of forums for years, and I've been posting on automotive forums since the late 1990s, and on BBS before that, and on e-mail lists before that, going back 20+ years on the internet.
For just a moment set everything else aside. Then we can re-visit the topic of “selling with negativity”.
I agree with you there. I really don't like doing that, and I slipped up on the whole Eibach R2 coilover issue.
BUT... I have a big problem with how they are marketing these shocks. They say "Made in the USA" on the box, picture of Old Glory flying, but I know for a fact that that is an inaccurate portrayal of where these shocks are made. We have seen many sets of R1 and R2 shocks up close and they have manufacturing techniques, materials and quality only seen on Chinese built products. And after doing a bit of research we found shipments from a South American company that makes shocks to Eibach, which is another smoking gun. You just cannot make a double adjustable coilover monotube with remotes in the USA for $2150. That is un-possible. There are also many ways now to find out when an American company is importing large amounts of parts from overseas, and from where, and in what dollar amounts, and when, and what it weighed. This is how Granetelli got busted in "non-factual statements" on other forums. And it will be the demise of the "USA built" Eibach shenanigans, eventually.
Again, I normally stay out of all negative attacks, but sometimes an issue is too heinous to be ignored. I've confronted Eibach with these issues, and I'm even an Eibach dealer, but they don't seem to be changing their tune. I've seen horrible end user problems with their shocks. I refuse to sell those products for these reasons. I surely could make money hawking their wares, but I won't go there. I don't want to make money like that. I don't sell sweatshop far east shocks, either, and I get about a dozen inquiries a day asking me to. Not trying to sound all high-and-mighty, but I don't want to make money that way. And yes, most of what comes out of China with regards to aftermarket suspension is junk. Garbage. Unreliable. Low quality. Choose your negative adjectives. We've tested sets, dyno'd them showing fake knobs that do nothing, torn them apart and seen so many corners cut. I don't go pouring this data out there in huge volumes, because it always makes
us look like the bad guys. But the data is there, and irrefutable, and I will continue to say "that stuff is junk" when appropriate. Especially when they are sold under false pretenses. But you're right, I don't like doing that, and I try to avoid it.
We also don't sell "low cost" shocks. You get what you pay for with shocks, often times. Some would also call low cost shocks "cheap", but that has a negative spin and again, makes us look like the bad guys. Some people only sell low cost things, and that's fine, but we won't.
But Vorshlag also doesn't say things
like this. I won't NOT share tech with a forum or an individual just because they aren't paying me money. We're not in this to get rich (not hardly!) and will share our experience from racing or testing or "bad choices" we've made in the past, and we do it whenever asked. Sure, it helps if you become a customer I might even talk longer, but some folks that talk to us never will buy from us. Fact of life - we don't make everything for everyone.
Like how many Mustang folks think $2200 AST shocks are outrageously expansive, even if they have a $40K+ Boss 302 or GT. That's fine. As they get into any sort of competitive motorsport they will figure out what works better and what doesn't. There is no free lunch - cheap shocks slow you down. Chinese shocks tend to have horrible reliability and other blatant performance problems. There are trends and generalizations you learn over time, if you test enough products. Racers tend to understand why quality monotube adjustable shocks cost what they do, and the $2200 that AST 4150s sell for is far cheaper than the starting price for Moton ($5500), MCS, Ohlins, Penske, JRZ, and the like. That's a fact, that's not being a sales wh0re or a mud slinger.
EDIT: Good news! Just got a PM and the site owner here will now allow Vorshlag to be a paying sponsor, and asked us to continue adding tech like we have been. So now we can continue to bring you our project threads, answer questions and show our watermarked pictures and won't have to dance around the "don't act like a vendor" issue. I'm going to update my signature as soon as that is official, hopefully tonight.
