where the hell have you been, wasn't quite ready to start dredging the canal but the thought was there. We miss you on Yahoo.
You refer to the Archives of E-S re: what is in the past. I have very little use for what happened last year or 5 years ago and this is all that Intellectual Property everyone here is so concerned about. What Value is there in a post about how someone had a problem with a pulse modulated controller that went out of production several years ago or how some manufacturer ripped you off when that company no longer exists? All the schematics, drawings, video links from the past are of almost zero value now to anyone because the world moves on and isn't stuck in the past. Rick Kosiorek posted a few pages of pics showing one of my Sanyo/Rabbittool hub motors I was selling and well those pics were nice and the data interesting but those hub motors went out of production 5 years ago and so what is the Current Value in Dollars of those pages of pics/data?
You extract only the posts that are of a strictly technical nature and will have some connection to 2011/2012 and delete the rest and I'll bet you'll have no more than a few hundred pages of material that might have some value to someone.
What Value do you place on Posts saying it is 72 F outside today or some jerkoff in a car cut me off while I was riding my iZIP home. As for Intellectual Property a lot of Members here have double digit IQs who are here only because the Cartoons have not started on TV yet and when moving forward do we fight to retain posts from Members who contribute nothing of any value worth reading beyond their Humor value?
I like this crap re: the stuff I posted is mine and Trevor isn't going to make a buck from my Intellectual material. Good f*ckin grief give these guys a frontal lobotomy. Now if someone posted the schematics for the missile guidance system of the Raptor Fighter-Interceptor I could see them wanting that info protected but when you want crap like its 72 F outside today protected from Trevor something is wrong here.
Endless-Sphere is mostly a place you come to waste time shooting the sh*t with like minded souls and it is way better to be here than spending Quality Time with the misses. When a person is faced with a technical challenge they post asking for assistance and assistance is usually heaped upon them and that is good and as it should be.
When people come to E-S to blow off steam, take hostages or run people into the ground to make themselves feel better that happens too but is this the crap you want to keep in the Forum and fight to save it? Trevor could make a fortune selling a lot of E-S Posts to Howie Mandel for use in his stand up comedy acts. I know I get a chuckle reading a lot of what people here post and I have almost zero sense of humor. Oatnet alone could keep Howie Mandel's audiences in stitches laughing.
PS I'm not planning on hanging around E-S. Just dropped in to contribute my 2 Cents and make YPedal's day.
Chalo wrote:Joshua,
Remember that you're talking about a forum "owner" (in quotes because the meaning of that term is slippery in this context) charging rent to the folks who, for lack of a better analogy, wrote all the stuff in the library and made it worth visiting. When I pay a subscription fee for something, I'm thinking "what do I get for my payment?" and not "what do I have to contribute here that would be of value?"
The quality difference between commercial forums like V is for Voltage and fundamentally noncommercial forums like E-S or rec.bicycles.tech is pretty huge. The people who hang around the highly commercialized forums (ad-based or subscription-based) for very long are those who don't mind them, and who for whatever reason have little of value to offer.
There is no equitable way to pay a profit to the person who keeps the lights on, while charging a fee to the people who wrote all the material the lights are supposed to be illuminating. Robert Heinlein said "never work for free for someone who's working for money", and I believe that applies in this case. The best, most insightful and community-minded contributors understand this principle without having it spelled out for them, and they don't do it. That doesn't bode well for a thriving forum that converts to a commercial model. At best, you'll have an archive of all the good stuff from before the change, plus a sorry assortment of lesser activity afterward.
Chalo