[nearly original] Open Letter to Endless Sphere Community

[liveforphysics]

Silentflight, who is awesome, just totally laid down the truth in plain simple terms with no sugar sprinkled on top.

That's exactly how I see it as well. Interestingly enough, that's how almost every core member and even Mod here that communicated with me feels as well (which the exception of our favorite and always hustling profiteer JRH of course. )

Nicely done.



-Luke

 

[Jozzer]

I agree, Justin FTW! He's the only option here I would trust to both do a good job AND keep the basic principle behind this site intact.
Selling the site out from under us without even discussing first was a disgusting move and couldn't be further from the ethos of this forum, shame on you KnightMB.
The fact that Trevor wants to "Buy" the site rather than just help support it speaks volumes.
Jozz

 

[Ariane]

Hi Guys,

Let me know where this new forum will be because i have some new project in mind and i will be happy to see you again :wink:

Good day!
Black Arrow

 

[spinningmagnets]

Google ypedal if a bunch of long-time frequent posters disappear, he has a website that was occasionally used for touching base when ES was temporarily down from a glitch.

http://ypedal.com/Forum/index.php?sid=9868a71056272a6d4509e062446e5932

 

[markobetti]

Everybody including me would be happy for justin to host new forum.. But even Justin said lets have a discussion ; so in the heart of discussion before you all start killing this forum and opening new ones lets give a Trevor a word to speak his mind with facts without marketing talk...... And lets leave the anger behind for now
Answers like this would be preffered ; ONLY facts
1st change this
2second change that etcc..

After that ; we can see if this things work out for us or not .. maybe some minor changes that mean something for trevor are acceptable .. Maybe there are few improvement ideas... All i am hearing are banners ... Is there anything else ?

One thing i really dont f... Care is how much money he has or for how much money somebody sold the forum .. If the forum is runned as it should be ... Right ?

This is second and most important place for me on web that i post and i want to see it alive because i can finally start my build blog with new frame etc.. And i want my crazy e motor people to be with me in build !! So i CARE also and just want to see exact fact talk from Trevor and us ; the forum members and moderators ...

 

[Ypedal]

holy crap... i go to sleep for 5 hours and come back to a 7 page thread lol.... finally got caught up to the discussion.

****.. deleted what i wrote.. one big ass page of it.... grrrr.. too many unknowns *****

 

[Andy R]

Just a newbie lurker here but wanted to share some thoughts.

It seems like the tone in this discussion is less respectful then what I have read over the years at ES. It seems like a few people would love to see this place implode so they could get control of it. Why didn't they approach knightmb and buy the place before? Spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) is a great way to try and discredit someone but do you really have to stoop to that level. I don't understand why you can't wait and see what the new owner does not judge him on what you fear he's going to do.

@Justin, your whole site (ebikes.ca) is indexed in Google. They are benefiting from showing your content on their site. Why don't you go ahead and remove your site from Google since they are showing ads around your site. Wait, that would be a bad idea because you would get less traffic, less sales to your store and it would ruin your strategy to gain market share of the eBike market. Google has been indexing ES for years so your posts have been surrounded by ads on Google for ages. Your no idiot, you know that participating and being part of the community is good for business. Now you want to host a non-commercial forum on your commercial site, oh, I get it... Rather then continue to participate here you would love for this place to implode so you could have THE forum on your site. Sounds self motivated to me.

I understand everyone's concern about having a new unknown owner but you should at least give him a chance. Either he will earn your trust and help make ES a better community or he won't.

 

[jonescg]

Lurker for all of 20 mins... :?

The fear, uncertainty and doubt is only being made worse while the true motives of Knight and Trevor remain unknown. A no BS statement would go a very long way.

 

[bigmoose]

In my mind the trust has been broken here. If things don't go "over the edge" in a month or two, we have no assurance they won't in the future. The almighty dollar has spoken.

I got called into a customer site to shoot a driver failure issue on a 3 Phase Brushless DC controller on Tuesday. I don't even want to say how much I billed them for that 6 hour consult. I try to give that same quality advice here, for free, to guys trying to dream their dreams. My IP is not for use in a monetization scheme. Is that to the point and clear enough.

BTW I don't know what was wrong with this board, as it was. Growth will destroy things oftentimes. Fill the board with 50,000 knuckle dragging, mouth breathers writing sh_t about everything and the signal to noise ratio will plummet. That is not a place I would find productive. Some can relate to this as the Endyn board versus the Honda Tech board. We lost the Endyn board, and I still miss it terribly. Good front ends, back ends, search engines without content is meaningless. Content can survive without those things ... as long as competent backups are done to prevent data loss.

I am 110% behind Justin's proposal. He is a good man, with good intentions. He has repeatedly gone out of his way to help members and customers, and that to me confirmed his character. He has vision, he has ethics and he is smart, and he's young with a lot of good years left. What more could we want in our new home?

There is room for both boards. Let Trevor run the consumer/vendor board of his dreams... and we can migrate to a developer/innovator board to continue our work.

Let's lock and load and rock and roll.....

 

[Andy R]

The fear, uncertainty and doubt is only being made worse while the true motives of Knight and Trevor remain unknown. A no BS statement would go a very long way.

I thought they already laid out their motives. A site was hosted on a commercial technology company for years. The owner of the site sold it to someone else who is planning to invest time and resources to make it better and plans to continue to offer the service for free. In order to offset costs such as hosting, backups, server admins, new features, etc he's going to show ads and let member opt-out of seeing them. It sounds like he understands the importance of the vendors and is planning to take care of them to help them grow their businesses. I understand the reluctance to welcome someone you don't know as the new owner of the community but giving the guy some time to prove himself seems prudent and fair.

 

[TylerDurden]

He is a good man, with good intentions. He has repeatedly gone out of his way to help members and customers, and that to me confirmed his character. He has vision, he has ethics and he is smart, and he's young with a lot of good years left.

100% trustworthy, IMO.

 

[Ariane]

I am 110% behind Justin's proposal. He is a good man, with good intentions. He has repeatedly gone out of his way to help members and customers, and that to me confirmed his character. He has vision, he has ethics and he is smart, and he's young with a lot of good years left.

+1
Black Arrow

 

[Ypedal]

There are 2 types of people, Members, and Vendors...

I put Justin in the Members group, contributor, participant, firm believer in the movment..


Vendors are those who have zero interest in posting anthing other than " This item for sale " ...

Vendors are not interested in a discussion forum, they just want sales...... the rest is considered a waste of their time.

Personally, i do not want vendors in this forum, at all, but it's not my forum, obviously... those members selling stuff on the forum have earned that right in the past, and i'd like that trend to continue..

my 0.02 of the 100$ i have to say about it.

 

[Jozzer]

So this deal is signed and done? No discussion here will change anything? We either keep posting and hope Trevor has (and will always have) our best interests at heart, or leave and go play somewhere else?
I for one remember how and why this forum started in the first place, seems to me that if we had been asked then "so, one day we'll sell the whole site to the first guy who makes an offer without even seeing if anyone else has a better plan/offer, or mentioning it to the users who create the sites content" we would have laughed and walked away at the outset.
Hardly surprising folks are upset...

 

[Ypedal]

I understand the need/want to make money, dont' we all, but i think there are countless ways to do this without taking money from vendors to advertise.....

- Contests
- Fund raisers
- Merchandise ( likely the best one )

...

 

[Jozzer]

There are 2 types of people, Members, and Vendors...

I put Justin in the Members group, contributor, participant, firm believer in the movment..


Vendors are those who have zero interest in posting anthing other than " This item for sale " ...

Vendors are not interested in a discussion forum, they just want sales...... the rest is considered a waste of their time.

Personally, i do not want vendors in this forum, at all, but it's not my forum, obviously... those members selling stuff on the forum have earned that right in the past, and i'd like that trend to continue..

my 0.02 of the 100$ i have to say about it.

I agree, Justin is not here to make customers but to help people, his devotion to the "revolution" has been tireless and one of the least selfish of all participants. He should most definitly not be cosnidered a "vendor".

 

[Jozzer]

I understand the need/want to make money, dont' we all, but i think there are countless ways to do this without taking money from vendors to advertise.....

- Contests
- Fund raisers
- Merchandise ( likely the best one )

...

ES could have even started it's own shop, selling products made by it's users (not it's vendors!) for a reasonable profit to cover running costs. Many many other options, but no choice was given!

 

[fechter]

holy crap... i go to sleep for 5 hours and come back to a 7 page thread lol.... finally got caught up to the discussion.

Ditto! I just noticed this popped up.

+1. Here's the thing, regardless of what Trevor paid KnightMB for the ES site, the actual ownership of the content belongs to everyone who wrote and contributed said content. There is some value for sure in having hosted and provided a platform in which that info got posted, and that is worth something, but it is quite small compared to the value and the man-hours that went collectively into generating all of the info that makes up the ES site as we know it.

So we as users and contributors should be the ones ultimately having a say in how this board is run. If Trevor really does have the best plan, then he should have an opportunity to try convince us of that. Coming clean about how much $$ he paid for the site, explaining why he purchased it, what his background and motivations are etc. would be a very good start. Drop the weaselly business speak as MrZed put it and, as Methods said, show some openness and transparency. We're all waiting.

That pretty much sums up my thoughts.

In the beginning, going back to the turn of the century, there was Yahoo Zappy Group, started for owners of Zappy scooters. I think this group still exists, but I haven't looked at it in years. The Yahoo Groups format sucked and eventually Ken Trough created the original VisforVoltage forum. The energy and atmosphere of that place took off like an Agni on Lipos. It was a great feeling. Somewhere along the line, Russian hackers infiltrated the site and trashed the database. At the same time Ken totally flaked and was accused of some kind of legal wrongdoing not directly related to the forum. Anyway, the forum died a horrible death and loads of great material was forever lost. In the ashes of that, members tried to gather themselves again and knightmb offered to host a site for free that could be used to recreate the old forum. We were all thankful to knightmb for providing a place to go. At the same time, another group of former VforV members created a new Voltage forum on a different site. There was a split in the membership and disagreement over the management style among other things. Today you can compare the two sites and see what happened. It should be a lesson to all. http://visforvoltage.org/

Personally, I have spent thousands of hours on the forum and tried very hard to guide the development and maintain the atmosphere that I found enjoyable and beneficial to the members. Between donations from members and projects in the community interest, I have about broken even financially, well, actually probably a slight loss at this point. I was never in it to make money, but breaking even made it easier to justify some of the time spent.

Before Trevor announced the buyout, I was working with another party to do essentially the same thing. It was time to move the forum to the next level. Unfortunately we were about a week too late and the deal was already done. I had no idea this was coming.

At this point, it seems like we should see exactly where Trevor is heading before taking any kind of drastic action. There are at least two other parties (Justin is one) that are interested in hosting the site and upgrading the features while maintaining our original objectives. I would not like to see a repeat of the VforV split nor would I like to see tons of valuable content get wiped out by disenfranchised members but I do not control everyone.

 

[Icewrench]

In a way I see this forum as a public institution similar to a library ,school house, or a university.
Definitly a place of learning and teaching. Some very serious students attend here and some who are happy with an E grin.
Gifts of knowledge and experience are the norm.
Those who receive do return the favor to others all for free.
An amazing collection of masters of many trades are here.

It means nothing which server acts as our host, as long as the exchange of knowledge continues un encumbered.

 

[grindz145]

I'm really bummed...

I'll be happy to work on scripts/etc to mine and delete all personal content off of this forum for migration purposes It will be like this forum never existed. Not saying that's a threat or anything....

I trust Justin, I and wouldn't think twice about moving there. Just a shame to see ES fracture.


Thank you to all the selfless individuals who have contributed content. You've all been an inspiration to me, all the while NOT making any dime for it. Hopefully that spirit will live on wherever the forum exists.

Knightmb, we would have bought the site from you you.... would have been much happier to take it off your hands.........

 

[wasp]

why was this all kept quite and then dumped on us? we the members have had no input at all thx
the silence is telling and the refusal to answer ANY questions night/trevor says it all
i really hope we get a home soon as this eviction scares many
were is the discusion with night/trevor...they seem absent from this post...wonder why
we are owed a expanation/discusion and you night/trevor need to come to the table with clean hands...

 

[mrzed]

I first looked for information on electric bikes in 2004 and the single best source of information I found was the UBC Electric bike club. I quickly learned that my desire for an ebike with 70km range while climbing a 300 metre hill was impractical, but I kept checking back because the stuff was so interesting and getting better all the time. That site and the info on it transitioned to ebikes.ca when Justin graduated. Then Justin did his trip across Canada, and as usual, rather than documenting all of it on his own site, he posted it on ES for the world to see and linked to it. I followed that link and was eventually pulled in. My commute got shorter, I had a kid, and I finally decided to get an ebike as it was now practical for my commute. I naturally purchased from ebikes.ca.

That sale made no money for Justin I'm afraid to say - because he replaced my controller twice and the hub motor once, all without the slightest complaint and based entirely on my description of the problem. If I had more money to spend on this stuff, I would happily spend it at Grin Tech to hopefully make up for this. I'd also note that the one part of my kit that never had an issue was the part that Justin designed and manufactured - the Cycle Analyst.

I would absolutely trust Justin to host a community. I would also happily donate my time or money to help make it happen.

 

[methods]

I thought they already laid out their motives. A site was hosted on a commercial technology company for years. The owner of the site sold it to someone else who is planning to invest time and resources to make it better and plans to continue to offer the service for free. In order to offset costs such as hosting, backups, server admins, new features, etc he's going to show ads and let member opt-out of seeing them......

Andy R - you are clearly a smart guy and clearly a shill. Nothing pisses me off more than a lurk who shows up in the middle of an argument and starts to spew propaganda under a new name. That is the oldest trick on the forums old boy... Please beat it lurk - if you have something to add to this debate you can do it with an account with MORE THAN ZERO POSTS.

nOoBs are welcome to sound off here - a guy with 25 posts about his new bike build is a member and has a voice. Someone who registers in the middle of the night during a debate is a shill and has no business speaking here.

Whats your name and where do you live?
I am Patrick Schindler and I live in Livermore CA
If you want to know what I am all about I have left several thousand posts for you to judge my character.

(grrrr... )

-methods

 

[methods]

I am glad Fechter has finally spoken out. Fechter is not only the guy with a red name - he is the guy who slaves tirelessly to help noobs and Guru's alike. When I first came to the boards Fechter was the first to take me under his wing. He has always offered his help to me with no prospect of return. Hell... Even when I am stealing one of his ideas for my own personal profit he still climbs way out on a limb to help and make sure I succeed.

Know why?

Because he is a REAL ENGINEER who is in this for the love of the game. I can tell you that he is as broke as a joke and has hardly even made a dime over the years but he keeps on working his ass off.

In my eyes Fechter has always been the keeper of ES. He is the one who brings in amazing selfless moderators like Ypedal and amberwolf. Do you guys have any idea how hard they work behind the scenes???

This man deserves some respect and our ear for the years of service he has put in.

-methods

+1. Here's the thing, regardless of what Trevor paid KnightMB for the ES site, the actual ownership of the content belongs to everyone who wrote and contributed said content. There is some value for sure in having hosted and provided a platform in which that info got posted, and that is worth something, but it is quite small compared to the value and the man-hours that went collectively into generating all of the info that makes up the ES site as we know it.

So we as users and contributors should be the ones ultimately having a say in how this board is run. If Trevor really does have the best plan, then he should have an opportunity to try convince us of that. Coming clean about how much $$ he paid for the site, explaining why he purchased it, what his background and motivations are etc. would be a very good start. Drop the weaselly business speak as MrZed put it and, as Methods said, show some openness and transparency. We're all waiting.

That pretty much sums up my thoughts.

 

[Jozzer]

Knight/Trevor? Anything to say? Was it really an "Open Letter" or were you just telling us your news? (seems to me an "Open Letter" would have been posted before a decision...but there you go.)