Uncletits When you look at the user list, keep clicking load more button while there is one. I think there are 44 members now. I hope other regular posters come over here, and I have a feeling they will.
A long post follows, sorry…but it is worth reading.
I think it’s worth a sort of broad explanation in this thread without mentioning names, and please don’t mention any forum or company names in your replies. We decanted here not because of hubris, or being let down in any way. We had a big job to clean up the old forum, and we believe we did a pretty good job. It was successful, had advertisers, sponsorship, a good classifieds (I can’t do anything as good here, but we will have a classifieds). We had to do that because the forum was being destroyed and made worthless, if that had happened it would have just closed. I am certain the owners would not have continued to run it at a loss for any period of time.
Unfortunately, the owners didn’t want to keep it and take a good income. I guess that’s their prerogative, and they took the money. Sadly it was sold to a company that operates in a particular way. I became aware of how they operated within minutes of being told about the acquisition, but I am always willing to be proved wrong…unfortunately I wasn’t. The total lack of any communication confirmed that, and the day of the first announcement about advertisers, was the day we moved on from the forum. We have a community and I intend to keep it that way. Some will not join us and that’s fine….they will eventually understand what is being done to that forum. The company bought the database of posts and will monetise that, they didn’t buy it for the user base, which although almost 30K people, really only consisted of 60 or so regular posters.
So why this forum?
Importantly, it’s not a get your own back….people who know me, know I don’t actually work that way and I tend to be more constructive in my responses. I and the other mods don’t feel bad about what happened, we knew for a long time that they were inclined to sell the forum. The company that acquired it is very large, owns lots of forums and have bought it for one purpose only…to make money. We can’t and wouldn’t want to hurt them in any way, but I’m certainly not going to help them do what they do!
I’ve been a member of a few forums and all of them tout their community chops to the members, but when the chips are down, they are monetised, when they get big, they get sold. Just like the old place was on two occasions, by the first owner who everyone thought was a saint and by the second owner who paid the saint a LOT of money for it. I intend to truly build a community, if the members want it and support it, and I have never monetised any of my on-line activities. Which includes this forum. You can tell it’s not monetised, a business or going to be quite easily:
- No Ltd company formed to take donations (this also means there is nothing to sell)
- No donate button to my company or me, if a donate button appears it will be to Freeflarum who are a non profit
- runs on a free platform (if it has to move to a paid one, then we have to reassess how we operate)
- The forum will never be sold (only passed on to the members)
You won’t see advertisement banners or have to pay for anything, this is not a business, it’s your community. Commercial members we allow on here will be to benefit you, if they want a presence on here, it cuts both ways..
P.S. I moved from Tapatalk for similar reasons, I’ll keep it as an archive, or in case anything happens here, but it will lie largely dormant, people may say, “well what about the content”. In truth content is perishable and people rarely searched back to posts made years ago. The knowledge is within us to rebuild content and answer questions