Just a thought.
Given the specific focus of this audience. One thing that might be helpful is to set up a sub-forum that has polling abilities turned on by default and encourage people to post product reviews. This would be the perfect place for members to share their experience with such items as filaments, printing plates and other 3D printing accessories.
This platform would be ideal for such a use. It would allow for Q&A and a sharing of similar experience by other members.
Amazon reviews as an example, have become worthless because they are manipulated by 3rd party BOT software and truth be told, most of the people who post reviews don’t make it clear as to how the product they purchase should perform. Furthermore, it’s been my experience that sellers will often have negative reviews pulled. I also have run into the frustration where my reviews on Amazon were denied because I was too harsh on a seller when I felt I was ripped off.
With the audience here, you would expect a much more granular likes and dislikes on a more technical level. This would allow the audience members to be able to make more educated purchase decisions.
YouTube channels that provide product reviews are notorious for shilling for whoever is paying the bills that month. Members here wouldn’t have that bias. So reviews posted here would be far more trustworthy and candid free from outside manipulation. Let’s face it, vendors might be able to bribe YouTube influencers but it’s a lot harder to try to influence a group of people.
The only caveat to that is for such a sub forum to work and be trustworthy, it would have to have clear guidelines of acceptable use and not turn into a bitch forum and also be free of censorship and moderator manipulation. What that means is that even if a Bambu product is given a poor review it should be allowed to stand despite negative comments. In turn, Bambu benefits because they get to see market data candid and first-hand on what customers really think about Bambu’s products and their competitors.