It has been the plan for some time now, to expand the Market Place subforum (now section), to include subforums for any vendors who wish to be listed. This option is available to everyone. ByFormica is the first vendor to take advantage of this. In addition to that, what byFormica has decided to do on their own website, is use their subforum as a means for discussion through iframes and other coding. Anyone can do it if they know how.
It was also suggested a while back that vendors have some sort of label indicating affiliation or bias, as is done on a lot of other forums. We decided that would be a good idea, but just haven't decided exactly how yet. The way this will work, is anyone who claims to be a vendor in order to have their own subforum instead of just a simple thread in the "General Market Place" subforum, will be required to be labelled as such. I think this will keep vendor subforums limited to real vendors, or at least people who will be acting as as a vendor for all intents and purposes. This does not mean that just because a vendor does not have a subforum they won't be labelled as a vendor, this is more of a control on vendor subforums.
If anyone has any questions, ideas or suggestions about this, post them here.