I'm getting confused by the way people keep getting pissed about "having to buy back the freely given content that was never to be sold in the first place...".
I don't feel like that is the situation at all; our content would have remained our own and we would have bounced to a new server if Trevor wasn't interested in doing the right thing. He would have milked our intellectual contributions for as long as he could while methods and co. went to town on the site destroying what they could while we settled into a new home. For most of the hardcore membership that wouldn't even have been hard.
BUT. In that scenario we loose our home, our clubhouse. The links to e-s all over the internet would have suddenly become useless. It would have been harder for new people interested in e-vehicles to engage in the new site until it was the size of the old one. We would have perhaps ended up with a better home, but it would have been a major disruption for many of the people depending on this site on-goingly for information. A lot of hard work for many members building the new site. Even simple silly things like loosing post count so that it's harder to tell the experts.
So i fully agree with buying the URL; it was the only thing that was never ours to begin with. It doesn't suck that we have to buy it; if knightmb was a better person he would have approached the community and said "look, the hits the site is generating is worth cash, i could sell to this potential buyer but i want to give the es community a chance first." Imagine if this URL was property; you can't expect it's value to increase substantially and for that not to have an effect on the owner. It was his URL to sell, and although the appraised value of the site is based on members free contributions, the ACTUAL value is in the community, and it came out over the weekend that the community is not to be sold, the experts wont stand for that shit and that the true value still belongs to us. So now we will own the clubhouse too instead of renting it.
It doesn't suck that Trevor is willing to sell, perhaps eat some of his investment out of recognition of the faulty goods he was sold, or that Justin will now own the domain. It really just sucks that our original owner was perhaps always just waiting out for the cash he could make off us.