If there’s enough interest, I’ll go through and make sure all the posts comply with the rules and bring it back. If not… we’ll let sleeping dogs lie.
How did the posts suddenly fall into noncompliance? Seemed fine as is.
Normal people not in the pheromone business or any related business get the most freedom here, bar none.
As in the US, while civilians have the greatest freedom of speech, companies and enterprising individuals do not. Commercial speech is very limited in the US by law, and limited once again when you are on private property by whoever pays for and maintain that property.
Commercial speakers have to watch what they say, both for the sanctity of the forum (so it doesn’t became a spamhaus), and to follow the laws of this country and the 50 states we’re directly affected by. There’s FTC limits on marketing speech and claims, FDA limits on health claims, there’s words that can create liability situations, etc. Commercial speech is a tricky area.
For people doing business on the forum, pretty much the same rules apply as you find at the grocery store. i.e., the same same sort of rules and courtesies apply to a food company rep while on the premises of Safeway, or for a Safeway rep when visiting the the aisles of Trader Joes or Target. Businesses co-exist and even work together successfully all the time, but there’s certain protocols and conventions that are followed.
Most people who shop at local grocery stores sort of know these rules unconsciously, but I’ll make them very explicit here:
1. You gotta ask! Tell us your intent, what you want to get out of it, what you want to contribute here, etc.
Just common courtesy type stuff, the same as if you wanted to sell peas in the veggie aisle of Safeway.
It’s especially important to be sensitive to these issues on a forum. As you can clearly learn on public sites such as theadminzone.com, most internet forums do not allow any sort of R&D or commercial related speech at all. Normally any type of commercial speech on most forums or blogs is seen as spam by users.
We’re a little different in that we’ll work with you when you are credible and you ask permission. However, you’ve got to make sure you don’t trigger the “oh wow, they’re spamming” trigger most forum users have in their heads.
2. We always carefully consider who’s asking. Sort of like a “credit check”, the quality of any request is evaluated by the quality of someone’s behavior within an industry and/or community.
We normally refuse business requests from people who have not contributed here significantly. Unless you have proven credibility in some other significant manner (such as James Kohl has), we use your contributions here to the community as a “pre-qualification” system.
Obviously if you ask us to do something, Gegogi, we’re likely to do anything we can for you – on a personal or a business level. You’ve got “good credit” with us. You’ve proven yourself to be a benefit to the community in general without any sort of monetary reward, and that behavior would likely carry on in your business affairs we well.
We have clear proof that you’d likely continue to be a benefit to others, even when money becomes involved. That’s what we want to see. “Pure entrepreneurs” who are purely money fixated, we don’t like so much.
2b. Is the person asking a good match for our way of doing things? We’re not compatible with everyone’s way of doing business. We see money best made as a side effect of honestly doing your best to help people. Delayed gratification is an important aspect of positive business. Most of the companies I admire most do this, from Trader Joes to Nordstrom. You could call this “People first, the money will eventually follow” method. To explain R&D, I often like to say “Edison had to invent the lightbulb before he could sell light”
While other business models may very well “work” for some people, I only personally support others who have this type of ethic. This is an ideal driven project, run by an idealist. You can think whatever you like about me, but you should understand that we wouldn’t have developed the largest selection of pheromone molecules on the planet in the short amount that we did, if I hadn’t had these operating ideals.
Both Monell and several key technology development houses are vastly better funded, and have explored much the same areas we have. Monell’s early funding, in fact, was almost completely for pheromone related research conducted by Bill Masters. Every few months, IFF’s charismatic CEO at the time, Hank Walter, would send him a huge check to help fuel investigations into human odors.
Today, Monell receives both multiple millions in federal grants (i.e., your tax money), as well corporate sponsorships from over 51 major American companies, including every major fragrance house and even Coca-Cola, Lipton and Hershey. They employee over 50 PhD level scientists. Yet after 41 years now (they were started in '68), Monell still doesn’t know if pheromones are even real, much less understand the novel non-sexual applications we’ve found and developed for these molecules after 5 or 6 years. They do some interesting theoretical work to be sure, but maybe my Edison & Bell R&D inspired approach has some merit, too. Just maybe! 
Our effectiveness here is an extension of my both my thinking and business philosophies. You can’t really separate the two. More “commonplace” business philosophies are operative elsewhere, and you’ll see more commonplace results. Aside from Pherin Pharmaceuticals, most companies don’t do any significant pheromone related R&D at all. They don’t really contribute anything new at all. (Except for Pherlure, which took the “science” of fraud to entirely new heights!)
3. Preferentially, use the MX system for your tests, so people know you have our blessing and we can handle testing logistics. This do not necessarily constitute a requirement to do business with us exclusively. There’s lots of ways to arrange things, depending on your level of talent, ethics and commitment.
Obviously someone like James Kohl is very committed to the pheromone industry. This is not a hobby for him or “something he’s just trying”. He’s not leaving any time soon, and both on this forum and in the scientific community he often contributes without reciprocation required or demanded. For these reasons, we’re more than willing to contribute back to with him by allowing a link to his site, even though it has an affiliate link to Love Scent. Those who haven’t put in the time and effort someone like James has, are unlikely to get quite the same level of permission here.
On the other hand, we have options for nascent (new) developers to act in a commercial manner here, without causing any undue damage.
For example, by using using the MX system for your commercial tests, people clearly know you have our permission to use it. There’s no doubt in anybody’s mind that you’re not spamming.
Nobody can sneak into our offices and insert things into the MX system. No one is confused about you having “received permission” when something pops up in the MX system.
Also, you have the benefit of a very good fulfillment service. The #1 things most inventors and artists lack is someone who’s good on the “business end” of things, like getting packages there on time.
or
**3b. If you don’t want to use the MX system, you must have earned an unusual amount of trust to conduct anything that even looks commercial here, and you must always make it extremely clear that what you’re doing publicly on our property is with our blessing. **
If you do not make it abundantly clear to the public that you have our blessing when posting commercially related messages here – usually many times over – then we tend to get flooded with spam and other systems are abused, and the people behind those system abuses tend to use you as an excuse.
They’ll do something that requires permission without seeking any, and say something along the lines of:
“Well, catlord did it”.
i.e., they will view this property as their own to do with as they please, which is much like someone using your workplace or living room as they place. It’s not ok without asking first.
Catlord is good man, a very good man, but he doesn’t yet have the credibility of very public figures such James Kohl or Dr. Charles Wysocki. For this reason, when people see him doing something that even seems “commercial” on here, a typical lurker or even regular user will think “Oh, I can do that, too”. Something that is not true. We’ll allow things of a commercial nature only with permission.
Basically, things need to be conducted in a manner so we never hear the type of language stucture that goes something like “Well, X did it.” “X” doing something not a valid excuse for having acted in a commercial manner on the forum w/o my permission.
The same principles that apply offline apply here. When you want to sell tupperware at your buddy’s house party, you just ask first. When you want to test your new beer at a local bar, you just don’t bring in your bag and start testing it. You ask the barkeep or owner first, and do things in a friendly manner.
The bottom line is the public always needs to know – over and over again, almost ad nauseum – that you received that permission to do anything that even appears to be commercial on here. Getting the permission is not enough, you must publicize that fact. On a public forum, simple things need to be communicated over and over again to reach everybody. Then said once again, and another time. And yet again. Otherwise, someone won’t see that communication and will get the wrong idea about what is OK and what isn’t.
If you don’t want the job of constant communication and re-communication, then using the MX system takes care of it.
All that said, we’re really easy to work with for people who have both good intent, and are willing to follow simple forum etiquette established for commercial users. Catlord can certainly put his thread back up if he wants.
Catlord - What are your feelings so far concerning the MX331-4 testing? Is it testing as effectively as you had expected, or is it much more complex than you thought. How do those mixes compare with what you are trying to achieve with LL?
how about a thread like, “why is this never in stock”
The original Liquid Lust was just me playing around and trying to discover how to turn the ladies I hung around on without using androstenone. I didn’t understand at that time that it could be buffered.
Over time, as my pheromone experience and understanding grew, it became a quest for the “holy grail” of pheromone mixes… and of course there cannot be just one.
As my experiments began to take shape and show me how various things interacted, I began taking it more and more seriously, because I could actually see myself achieving my goal. Then I discovered what became my calculator, and I managed to find the mix I was looking for fairly rapidly after that.
The actual goal evolved over time into something that became a potential commercial venture. Whether it goes that way in the end or not depends on how testing turns out, and what I and my friends at Androtics think when the time comes.
As for the testing, it’s been good for giving me a lot of data, but the results have been rather confusing… I don’t know which MXs correlate to which formulas either, but it’s been a pleasure to see many of my experiences and reports vindicated. Previous testing has been much less reliable than I had hoped, as the majority of my testers did not report, or did not report much.
The results I have been reading, whether positive or not, have been a pleasure to read because my new crop of testers (thank you all) is actually reporting, and I don’t have to wonder, “Are these just crazy college kids trying to pull my leg?” The results are in some cases in line with what I was hoping for/expecting, and yet tester to tester it changes, and I don’t always understand why. But it’s been a blast so far, and I am thankful to Androtics for the opportunity to do this testing.