I'm wondering how to handle the following social-political-technial situation and would be interested in your opinion!

Situation

Imagine you are an expert in some topic, let's use knitting for the example. Further assume you read posts in a lot of different knitting techniques forums. There is one specific forum driven by a specific knitting needle manufacturer, in which a lot of newbies post into and hope to do some good knitting with the manufacturers knitting needles.

The problem

Now, as you are the expert, you are aware that the knitting needles produced by this manufacturer are obsolete and contain bugs that makes knitting way more difficult than it needs to be. But you know there is a different product out there that does the job way better and costs the same.

Now you feel responsible to let those newbies know about the better knitting needles, but how would you tell them?

Posting to the forum

Posting to that specific forum that there are better knitting needles out there more than once may be seen as an abuse of the forum, because it's still driven by the obsolete manufacturer.

Posting to individuals

Replying to an individual when a question was asked within a forum is usually seen as bad behaviour and may be interpreted by the manufacturer as a indirect attack.

What's the best solution?

To me it looks like neither of the two options are good ones. Thus I'd like to hear your proposal to solve this situation.