Review Guidelines in Brief
3D Printing Professor LLC is always willing to use our platform to showcase new making technologies. 3D Printing Professor LLC will happily accept any hardware for evaluation. To maintain editorial trust with my audience, 3D Printing Professor LLC simply requires complete editorial control over any content produced, including the schedule of release. We will do our best to present the hardware in a positive light wherever possible, and will promote your brand with the name in the title and links in the description. If there are any issues with the hardware that occurs during evaluation, we will contact your support to see if the issue can be resolved.
If this sounds good, please contact me to receive a shipping address, and I look forward to working with you!
However, if you would prefer to have priority in the reviewing queue, 3D Printing Professor LLC does also offer sponsored content. You can inquire at the same contact address.
(Note, 3D Printing Professor LLC does use gmail for professional email for correspondence and the reply from that contact page will come from a gmail address.)
Detailed Review Guidelines
The following guidelines govern product evaluation at 3D Printing Professor LLC. This is document:
- “Reviewer” refers to 3D Printing Professor LLC.
- “Gear” refers to the product or hardware to be reviewed.
- “Provider” refers to the party providing the hardware or equipment for review.
Responsibility and Integrity
The mission of 3DPProfessor LLC is to:
- Help new comers start making
- Create cool things for others to make themselves
- Promote positive development within the consumer maker product market
The primary responsibility of 3D Printing Professor LLC is to it’s audience, who may become the consumer of the gear being reviewed. To that end, honesty and managing expectations is paramount. 3D Printing Professor LLC will do nothing that may damage it’s position of integrity with it’s audience. Any results and opinions presented in a review video or post will be a truthful representation of our experiences with a product. Under no circumstances will payment or other compensation be accepted to influence the stated opinion about a product.
At any given time, this reviewer has a back log of hardware to review that can be months long. This queue will be reviewed in a time convenient to the reviewers and the content of the video will be decided at the discretion of the reviewer. It is not the policy of 3D Printing Professor LLC to hand over any degree editorial control to any outside party.
In addition the provider must agree that the reviewer can keep the equipment after it is sent.
If the provider wishes to submit “review guides” or other documents with pre-audited talking points, they are welcome to help insure completeness in the final review, but the reviewer does not agree to read them in full in a review.
Sponsorship Opportunities
3D Printing Professor will not, for any price, promise a positive review on a machine or a dedicated video, sight unseen. The reviewer always maintains editorial control over any content produced, including what is said and the release schedule.
Providers can, however, purchase priority evaluation scheduling. Essentially, this puts the provided gear at the front of the review queue. The value of the gear does not constitute a sponsorship fee itself.
3D Printing Professor also offers a Quality Assurance Tester program for pre-release hardware. Details for the Quality Assurance Tester Program can be found in a section below below.
For cases where the gear doesn’t present a conflict of interest with the channel (in other words, gear that is not necessarily directly related to making, like wallets, decorative items, or other services), a 1-2 minute sponsored segment in several videos can be considered. In a sponsored segment, as long as there is no integrity violation, ad copy can be read as submitted if desired.
Gear requirements
While all gear is welcome, please note that there are a few rules that apply:
Product safety
“Safety First” is a motto at 3DPProfessor LLC. Gear that has glaring safety issues and would provide a danger to the user or the reviewer will not be accepted. Should it be revealed in the process of evaluation that the gear has a severe safety issue that is capable of damaging property or harming users, the gear will be decommissioned and the review process halted.
Quality Assurance Tester Program
Evaluating pre-release gear for video content can be problematic for both the reviewer and for the provider. If any issues arise in the course of evaluation, those issues would have to be disclosed in a review, possibly with the disclaimer that “These issues have been reported to the provider, and they promise to fix it in the future, but who knows.” This is a less desirable outcome for all parties.
For this reason, 3D Printing Professor LLC provides the Quality Assurance Tester Program. If you want to send pre-release gear for evaluation, providers will pay a QA testing fee, and then their gear will be evaluated in an Acceptance Testing capacity. The result of this evaluation will be reported back to the provider.
If the reviewer decides the gear merits a review after evaluation, it will proceed according to the specifications in this document, in other words, the reviewer retains complete editorial control over any content produced, including if a review is made.
Resolving issues
Up to the point that a reasonable consumer would, the reviewer will try to resolve any issues that might arise during testing. Contact will be made to the same support channels available to your consumers.
Cherry-picking
Cherry-picking is the process of sending a reviewer different gear than the consumer would receive. This is may be as benign as pre-testing the gear before sending it to the reviewer, or this may be as grievous as providing better gear under the name of something else. This is discouraged. However, the reviewer does have limited means to detect cherry-picked gear, so we need to trust product manufacturers and resellers to provide a product and experience that is identical to the product an end user would receive. If it is discovered later that the reviewer has been the victim of cherry picking, the video will be removed and a counter review may be posted to correct public misconceptions.
If the provider would like to make extra efforts for the reviewer to increase the chances of a positive experience, like taking extra care in shipping or providing optional upgrades that a consumer would have to buy seperately, for example, those accommodations must be disclosed to the reviewer as soon as possible to avoid any miscommunications and maintain integrity.
Consideration for to the Manufacturer
All content showcasing specific gear will include the name of the gear in it’s title and links in the description as outlined by the manufacturer.
Marketing Time Constraints
The reviewer makes no promise about release schedule at any time. Again, sponsored content can give the provider’s gear priority in the reviewing queue, but specific release times can not be promised. This is as much to protect the provider as for the reviewer. There are many issues that can delay the release of a video like shipping or hardware problems, and if not given time to be resolved because of a stringent video release schedule, only these negative points could be presented in a video.
Legal
3DPProfessor LLC is not required to accept any unsolicited product for review and retains the right to decline review opportunities for any reason.
Amendments
Many thanks to Toms3DP for providing and excellent framework to build this on. However, there is no way to future-proof this document. If new experiences with providers or marketers require changes to this document, then it will change without notice. This is not a legally binding document, but an expression of the guidelines the reviewer operates under.