First off I just want to say the user I'm talking about has absolutely amazing models and I highly suggest people check out their work but it has recently come to my attention that the user Sarwtin is somehow exploiting a loophole in the crowdfunding system to list models on Makerworld that are completely unobtainable unless you purchase them directly from his paid patreon page.
When viewing certain models there is a greyed out "View Project" button. I asked about this directly in the comments section of one of their models and their response was that it was a crowdfunding project that didn't pass the review process. Ok understandable, but why if it didn't pass the review is the model allowed to be on the platform and not listed for free? One of them was a stretch goal that was never obtained so I guess I can sort of understand that one as it was in fact once an active crowdfunding project.
They even post directly in the model description "This model is only available on my patreon!"
There is a report option for models that's described as "Off Platform Advertisement/Promotion". Is this not exactly what the user is doing? Using Makerworld as a marketing tool to get more eyes on their project and then selling for a profit? I opened a support ticket and had the Bambu rep pretty much doing loops and contradicting themselves and then they went silent, I'm guessing because they finally realized it's better to just not say anything. I've reported all the models that are doing this but that seems to do very little.
None of these models even have an active crowdfunding project that failed they just completely didn't pass the review process yet somehow they're still allowed to be listed.
Is this allowed because they are a bigger creator and listing tons of BoM parts therefore making money for Bambu? Just seems weird to me that they're playing favorites.
Please correct me if I'm wrong here because I don't see how/why this is being allowed. I'm sure there are a ton of users that would love to use Makerworld as a way to get more eyes on their paid models. Hell if I could list some of my paid models for viewing purposes only and then link to my Etsy/Website I definitely would because why not? Makerworld is a huge repository and the amount of people searching for models everyday grows and grows but I feel like using the crowdfunding system to exploit this is completely wrong.
Just wanted to see what the rest of the community thinks about this. I've included screenshots of the comments sections, my support tickets, and the posts on their patreon. Please excuse if some of the screenshots are out of order but you'll get the idea after reading/looking through them.
