I agree with you, personal messages should not be censored, but I haven't
yet experienced any of the censoring on the wearable arts board.

What I don't agree with, is the people who say you shouldn't go there
because it's a "for profit" organisation. The person who started the site
had a great idea. Somewhere for ALL artists to go. How cool is that? The
massive cost of the servers and the bandwidth and the sheer time it would
take to set up and programme those forums is serious money! I think it's
great that they sell advertising rather than just go bust and disappear. I
bet that the person running it doesn't make any decent amount of money from
that website. Every page anyone views on wet canvas costs someone money.
Why shouldn't they either charge the user or sell advertising to pay for
those costs? We also know the ridiculous costs of just keeping an artist
website running. Multiply that cost by thousands.

(Not an attack on Kalera, just fed up of people thinking that they should
get everything for free).

Charlie.

"Kalera Stratton" wrote in message
...
I have recently found out that Wetcanvas is actively censoring certain
links (to other forums) out of private messages between users... and
this really upsets me. I personally have made furthering accurate
information about lampworking one of my core values, and it breaks my
heart to see a popular company that actively seeks to "protect" its
customers from other sources of information. WC is now a for-profit
company, and profit has for some time gradually been rising over the
sharing of information as their primary goal.

I can't talk about this freely on WC, so I am talking about it freely
here, since I don't run the risk of censorship and this is a completely
uninvolved place. I'm really, really upset about this; although I had
some time ago made the decision not to post any tutorials to WC (I am
not giving a profit-seeking company my hard work for free) and have been
wavering on the decision of whether to advertise with them. Well, that
decision is made; my dollars go elsewhere. I spend over $2000/yr on
advertising and not a penny of it will go to them... meanwhile, I WILL
be contributing, financially and otherwise, to not-for-profit forums
like www.Artglassforum.com and www.ISGB.org, not to mention putting my
body and voice in places where I think I can make a difference, like
here.

--
-Kalera
http://www.beadwife.com