dndrich I have spent some time over the last few months on the Home-Barista.com forum. Seems like many knowledgeable folks on that site. But it is clearly monetized with lots of appropriate ads from the local companies including Clive etc. But it seems pretty innocuous. What are your thoughts about that site? I sure prefer this one, I must say, and I am glad I found it.
The site has always run as a business, it’s not been sold and monetised multiple times to end up in the hands of a faceless corporate who don’t care about coffee. The people running Home Barista are clearly interested in coffee and if they want to monetise it, that is their choice.
This site isn’t monetised because the small community has gone through enough and don’t deserve to be subjected to a profiteering corporate with zero interest in coffee, or the community. I’ve had enough and clearly so have they.
Interestingly, VS migrate all their forums (the one forum they have not migrated (Vbulletin), because I believe they own the Vbulletin system now. As I was saying, they migrate all their forums to Xenforo running on their platform. They do this because it’s all cookie cutter forums so paid admins can easily manage multiple forums and they are all arranged to data share and show adverts everywhere (the cost recovery model, after all they need to get 50-60K back). They announced a day or so ago they were going to Migrate the UK forum they took over for
- Benefit of members (yeah sure)
- Move from an old out of date system (the current forum system, used Invision was up to date)
- New features and functions (I think the opposite will be true
I’m glad you like this site…the UK coffee forum scene is small and fragile….we needed to show there is another way when VS come knocking, and anyone can do it. If a community wants to badly enough, it can go its own way for free. No advertisers or commercial interests to upset.
P.S. I thought VS wouldn’t care, but they did…now I would just like all the forums that are left to notice.
