The mods and I started this forum because many forums are owned by large corporates now, including the one we used to help run. I think three corporations own 95% of all forums. You can tell because each one owns forums with a particular look and feel on a common platform. Gradually, they swallow up forums by offering forum owners money to sell up. Most do sell and ride off into the sunset, a few don’t.
The companies buy the rights to monetise a forums’ database of posts, they don’t buy it to help maintain any community that’s formed, and really don’t care about the community. It’s why I started this forum…because enough is enough, and I moved from Tapatalk, leaving all the posts because it’s another one of the corporate monsters and I had no flexibility. I certainly did not want to continue helping 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 as our old hangout was on two occasions, by 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. I have never monetised any of my on-line activities, which includes this forum. You can tell it’s not monetised, or a business, because:
The forum will NEVER be sold by me (only passed on to one of the members if I can no longer continue)
No Ltd company formed to take donations or owning the forum (this also means there is nothing to sell)
No donate button to my company because I don’t have a company, the donate option has all monies paid to Freeflarum who are non profit
Runs on a free and fully managed platform called https://freeflarum.com/ (if it has to move to a paid one, then we have to reassess how we operate).
Runs on completely free forum software https://flarum.org/
No paying advertisers
You won’t see advertisement banners all over the place, or paying advertisers. You won’t 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 but I’ll keep it as an archive, or in case anything happens here, but it is now closed to new posts with a redirect to here. 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
If you want the detail of what happened, click here