What corporates can do when they monetise a forums data

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.

John_Yossarian Dave I did not have the slightest idea of the scale of what the corporate could do to a forum. I would call it a “forum plague”.
I have been visiting the old forum not realising that I was somehow helping their cause.
I will stop doing it, however tempting it might be sometime helping a newbie with an advice (we all have been there in the beginning) and I will stand guilty as charged.

Obviously, I need to ensure I clarify some things. It’s not every forum that dies, certain types of forum will always survive e.g. the speakev forum they purchased, because it covers a huge base of all electric cars and is something that (according to the government) we will all be driving one day. It’s all very new to most people, so a forum based on that topic will flourish. In general, forums have been having a hard time of it, as most (not all) are operated to make money for someone, and many don’t make much money at all.

VS are not evil in as much as no corporate is…but they are not there to further the interests of coffee or the community. Realistically, they are there to make money…period. It’s a bit like amazon, it’s to make money, now I have no problem with Amazon and use it, because it’s a convenient way to get stuff.

Coffee is my hobby though, it’s what I do for fun in retirement….I like helping people and people got a fairly poor offering 2 decades ago, a sort of any colour as long as it’s black world. I enjoyed helping companies bring far more richness to the consumer. Much of it by helping one company, which stimulated change and innovation in others to keep up e.g. Helping design the first Izzo Duetto. So it irks me to see what keeps happening in coffee and recently more and more people in it just to make a quick buck, prepared to say anything, regardless of it being bullshit.

The VS thing was simply a step too far for me, and something I could no longer support in any way possible. The stuff I did before for Tait was purely to help keep the forum healthy, so he would hang on to it (not close it)…instead he also decided to cash out. Please remember these are my standards and right for me..I don’t expect anyone else to follow them or feel the same way, I just wanted/needed to share my thinking and rational for what I (and the other 2 mods did).

I hope that it shows other forums who get assimilated that there is another way, and it doesn’t have to revolve around money. While freeflarum.com exists, anyone can do what we did for free and a few days of their time. It might also give VS pause for thought the next time they want to assimilate a small community, and do proper due diligence to find out it wasn’t almost 30K users…not even close..

I know we all like to help people (otherwise we wouldn’t be here) and it is very tempting to answer, only natural. However, I am glad you were able to make your own mind up about what was a “step too far” to you. I for one, hugely enjoy being on this forum compared to CFUK…because it’s ours.

P.S. CFUK only has 10-20% of our posting activity each day, as more people realise, it would be nice to see that drop to only spam posts and 1 post wonders, who join and wonder why no one replies..

Doram Unfortunately these are the exceptions. In most cases the corporates win.

Well, this time they have come up against highly caffeinated resistance….;and a resourceful, determined community.. For some reason, a few people who have not been seen for ages (I mean many years) are suddenly posting more often than they did in many years on CFUK, which is quite funny considering the situation. I can’t help feeling other forces are at work….but they will soon get bored.

That forum needs to die off, and then it sends a very powerful message to the corporates. I was asked about our “advertising rates” only today on “my” forum….so it’s still possible to quietly make money from a forum and must be very tempting for forum owners to do so..

My reply included:
The forum is completely non-commercial and requires no sponsors or payment from commercial entities.