| After careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion registration, in the manner required to participate in what was an open forum, is not my bag. | | Earl Moon |
Dear Earl,
We at SMTnet are sorry to hear your decision. You have been a big help to the SMTnet community and will be missed. If your decision has to do with specific issues in our registration process, we would like to hear your comments and address these issues. If you are objecting to the concept of registering, perhaps we have not explained our rational sufficiently. We believe if we had, then you would have agreed with us. Therefore, we would like to take this opportunity to start an open dialog on our rational behind this registration requirement. You are welcome to come back to the Forum any time, and we know it is up to us to convince you.
SMTnet was created with the notion that anyone in the electronics manufacturing community should be able to find the products, services, information, and solutions he or she needs instantly through SMTnet. At the same time, any supplier of products, services, information, and solutions should be able to reach potential customers instantly through SMTnet. Technology and the market change so rapidly that no one in our community can afford the time traditionally taken to find vendors or customers.
In keeping with this objective of creating an effective channel of communication, we feel it is important that users, like you, receive the right information. As a business, we are hoping to pay for our services with advertising income from vendors. However, you do not want to receive product and service information that does not apply to you. Nor do vendors want to deliver information to unqualified recipients. Therefore SMTnet is only interested in delivering viewers information that they have a specific need for, as expressed by their registration and subsequent updates. Although vendors will know the profile of users they are reaching, your name and e-mail address will be withheld from them. Any information you receive will be delivered to you by SMTnet, via the web site (banners, directory listings, etc.) or our SMT Express newsletter that is under development.
We believe the registration is not an invasion of user privacy. Instead, it is a protection of user privacy. We have provided the SMTnet Email service so that you do not have to give your personal email address. Some SMTneters have expressed concern that their e-mail address was mis-used as a result of showing it on SMTnet. Indeed, last month someone used a robot to strip email addresses off the SMT Forum. Our system caught the action immediately, before any of these email addresses were used. Further, we were assured they would not engage in such actions in the future. If a user is registered with SMTnet and uses the SMTnet.com mail address, then we have added protection: we will not allow third party mass emailing into your SMTnet.com mailbox.
The registration will serve two other purposes: to make posting to the SMTnet site easy and to maintain the professional quality of the site. For frequent posters like yourself, it saves time not having to type your address, name, phone number, etc., which is all stored in your profile page. Most of our participants are like you, donating valuable time posting quality questions and answers. However, overtime, there have been postings that did not live up to the professional standards that we have established. We�ve had to occasionally delete substandard postings with fictitious names and emails. If these people had to register, they would not have posted these messages. The quality of postings are important not only to our viewers, but also to our advertisers. A major advertiser was not willing to put a banner on the Forum page only because the messages are not monitored. We hope we can convince advertisers that with registration, our high quality content is further enhanced without the need of monitoring.
We have just automated the SMT News and SMT Library, allowing them to accept user postings instantly, just like the SMT Forum, the PCBCE Mart, and the Directory Database have been. All these are just ways to achieve the single SMTnet objective: to provide a fast and direct link between users and providers of products, services, information, and solutions.
We hope you find this helpful and agreeable. Please feel free to email me with your thoughts. Again, if you think the registration process can be improved, let me know too. We take every user�s comments seriously.
Thank you.
Cunli Jia Director, Product Development SMTnet
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