capuchin To run a forum like this is inexpensive as you say, probably £50-150 a month including admin and legal costs. I say legal costs as you’d absolutely need to make it a cooperative ownership structure to prevent the same pitfalls. That way no one person would have a right to sell or advertise on it, no matter what. The server stuff is relatively easy, you’d want to pay somebody to run the backend (takes around an hour a month), and then have volunteer moderators.
Well at the moment it’s free and certainly even if it was on a paid server, it wouldn’t cost 50-100 per month, I have already found one should freeflarum ever say we’re too big, affecting other forums and have to move. Hopefully that won’t happen as I keep it lean.
The one thing I know is I’m not going to sell it…but when I can no longer run it, or no longer want to admin it…all the above stuff can be dealt with as it’s handed back to the members. At that point people will know how successful it is, how much if anything it costs to run, how they need it staffed and owned. Sadly life has taught me that some people are easily corrupted and you can never tell who they are, not geting political,<politics on> but there is a shining example in Westminster </politics>. It takes a lot of resistance when a company like VS says here’s 50-60K for your forum. I know I will tell them to get stuffed and I have to make sure it never goes into an ownership structure where people say…thanks and ride off into the sunset
So you guys can open that complex can of worms when the day comes……at the moment I’ve done my best to ensure the forum has little if any value.
- There are no prebuilt migration programs for flarum to other systems that I know of
- there is no url, we share the freeflarum certs and url
- there are no images or documents held on the forum (why do you think Tait was so desperate to have everything held within the forum database).
- The forum has no paid advertising (and soon may have no commercial directory)
- I’ve already shown every member of this forum, just how easy it is to set up another one and move the entire membership to it, for “completely free”
- We have given VScrote a bloody nose and word gets round, so I don’t think anyone’s even going to be offering to buy us.
- I couldn’t care less about SEO, so thread name changes, tag changes, peoples name changes…I don’t care. All these things affect SEO and thus value.
- I have not formed a company…in my experience, corporates need to pay a company, see accounts and suchlike
One thing I completely forgot to mention, because it should be obvious, if a profit making corporate or business entity owned this forum, it would be rapidly shut down by freeflarum as it breaks the TOS.
