Clarifying the Global Sugar Art and CC relationship [repost]  

I just wanted to take a moment to clarify the relationship between Cake Central and Global Sugar Art.

There does seem to be some confusion out there about the exact relationship and that is the purpose for this post.

With the closing of the Cake Central Shop at the outset of 2008, we sought out a vendor with the record of customer service that we expected from ourselves. This lead us right to Global Sugar Art as a natural partner and supplier to the Cake Central Community.

Our arrangement with Global Sugar Art does not extend a specific discount to Cake Central members, they are already offering the lowest prices they can afford to.

When you buy something from Global Sugar Art, Cake Central will receive a portion of your purchase to support the CC site and keep it free. In order for Cake Central to receive credit for the transaction, you must click on one of the Global Sugar Art ads on the cakecentral.com website. This is the only way for Alan to track the sales.

Please do not call them to ask for the Cake Central discount or to apply your transaction to Cake Central's credit. All you have to do to make sure Cake Central receives a portion of your purchase is to click on the Ads found on our site.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any additional questions about the Cake Central and Global Sugar Art relationship.

We do not block all other vendor names because they are not Global Sugar Art. The only vendors whose names are blocked are vendors who have spammed our forum at some point in the past or entered into some kind of legal conflict with CC. We are not going to allow those companies to exploit CC for their own gain.

Do we promote Global Sugar Art as our first choice provider? Yes absolutely because we did our research and feel that there is no more trustworthy and service oriented vendor than Global Sugar Art.

We do not mean this as an attack on any other vendor, just that we wanted to find the single best Vendor out there to stake our reputation to when referring people, and our choice was GSA.

So maybe next time you see a vendor name get blocked, instead of being mad at CC for censoring it, maybe you should ask yourself what that vendor did to get themselves censored.

There are lot of other quality vendors whose names are not blocked, because they don't exploit CC or try to cause trouble for us.

And clearly that other person who posted created an account solely for the purpose of instigating this debate.

Alan has no say in what we moderate. Alan, like any other user, can ask us to review a post's information and challenge its accuracy, but the final decision is with us.

Alan has never asked us to block the mention of another vendor or competing product mentioned on the forums. The only thread he has ever asked us to look at was the one you mentioned, because they did not agree with the process of the study. Members are allowed to question the validity of something and to present what they feel is contesting evidence. It is up to Jackie and I to try and make sense of it all.

Should the thread have ultimately been deleted, moderated, or altered, I don't really recall how we came to the specific conclusion that we did in that situation, but ultimately that decision was ours, not Alan's.

Do we make moderating mistakes? Sure sometimes we do. Sometimes we handle situations well, and sometimes we don't. But that is really on us.

I apologize for any hurt feelings or ill-will caused by that situation, but I honestly feel that the blame for that should be on how Jackie and I handled it, and not about how you or Alan handled it.

The fact remains, every single piece of feedback we have received from any member who has been a customer of GSA has been extremely positive, we have never received a single complaint about the service from Alan and his team, and to this date, your situation with the forum thread is the only single incident in which someone has relayed to me any form of negative experience with Alan or GSA.

IF you ever have text blocked that seems odd to you, please let us know. If words like Luster dust are not working, it probably had to do with the code we had to magically link those words to the products in the CC shop back when we had one.

There are only a small handful of websites that are being intentionally blocked, like maybe 5. So as always, if something seems to not work the way you would expect, assume it is a bug and report it to us so we can fix it. If it is something that is banned, we will let you know, but that should only come up in a small set of situations.

oh I certainly did not feel you were trying to stir the pot, I was referring to the person who posted before you. I deleted their post because they registered an account for the specific purpose of starting an argument.

I have no problem with your post and I am happy to discuss it with you. I just don't like people registering an account for the express purpose of picking a fight which that person clearly had done.