I think discussions about how MD prices their “in-house” collaborations is fair game, in the same way the threads about CRKT’s new $750 knife or MAP policies are fair game. If a particular brand has questionable pricing practices for their products, that should be discussed.
But, as you suggest, pointing out every instance where MD sells other brands at higher prices than other retailers is probably not kosher. It never happens to other dealers, and I strongly suspect the reason isn't because of their retail pricing.
For part 1: the rule says "A dealer who does not have a paid subscription is not allowed to advertise in any way, shape, or form. In the past, dealers have used 'shill' accounts to promote themselves & their products; as a result we've limited all dealer advertising to The Exchange or registered Dealers with active paid subscriptions." The stated intent of the rule is to prevent unpaid dealers from advertising themselves or their products. Realistically, "advertise in any way, shape, or form" and "promote themselves & their products" are incredibly broad, and would potentially include any discussion of products and brands that aren't paid sponsors, since there's no way to definitively know whether a thread about a particular knife is shill advertising or not. But, in practice, it's been applied to restrict commercial links from unpaid dealers, which is pretty straightforward. As I said, linking to a site that has links to commercial sites (from both paid and unpaid dealers; one of the current top posts on that site is about the anniversary sale of a very prominent Bladeforums sponsor) is not really advertising or promoting a product or dealer. If the mods want to ban linking to sites that link to commercial sites, that’s their prerogative, but it’s over-inclusive. If they want to say “no linking to aggregating sites,” then they can say that, too. If
@Spark wants, I'll even do some pro bono legal work and help revise them [I'm an in-house corporate attorney, part of my job is writing policies and procedures for a Fortune 1000 company].
For part 2: Posting the link was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. That said, I think it's perfectly fair to discuss Massdrop's pricing as a "knife producer" (i.e. for their own collaborations), which is where this thread started, but not to single them out as a retailer for pricing on other brands' products (as OP has done in other threads). There was a
multi-page thread around New Year's that discussed impending price increases from Benchmade and Spyderco, and there was no issue with that discussion, nor in countless other threads about manufacturer pricing.
Maybe because your analogy to the "what's it worth" rule isn't really that useful... But I'll work with it. For reference,
the sticky on that rule. The rule is intended to keep people from asking about values as a way to indirectly solicit offers to buy their item. If someone posted a link to their blog post that was seeking the value of an item, it could be seen as a way for that person to still drive traffic to the item in an attempt to solicit offers, and would likely be a violation of the rule. But, posting a link to a blog as a general resource is likely not a violation, barring something that indicates it's specifically meant to try to sell something without proper credentials. Posting a specific item for sale on ebay is deal spotting, linking to ebay's homepage isn't.
