Any idea when the forum will see some needed upgrades? When attaching an image from Facebook or twitter (now X) for example, they often don't work. And twitter is still called that in the pop-up media window. I like this place and it still functions, but some updates would be even nicer. So, just wondering about timeframes and such? I know the owner is hard to reach.
Damned if I know... frankly my money is on never. We've not had any contact with the owner in over a year, and we've not seen him on line for nearly two. I'd like to talk to him about the team acquiring the site so we can look after it properly, upgrade it, and maybe turn it into a not for profit like .com, but we can't do that either unless we're able to get hold of him
FYI around the time of the hack/redirect I actually contacted him on Facebook but he may have already received your messages on his phone or however you contacted him. I only reached out to him on fb because it seemed if he has his name attached to the site (I think he even has it on his LinkedIn) he'd want to rectify the situation as soon as possible.
I wish I understood his motivations. Is it just enough passive income that he'd like it to go on as long as possible without doing anything? If that's the case, should we stop donating? If it's about money, what's his one-time payment price to let the community take things over? No one is "too busy" to just ignore something like this for literally years on end. It's very strange to me and I hope for change.
I think donations go towards the server costs, right? So it may not be a good idea to stop those. Oh, that would be awesome! I hope we hear from him soon.
Yes I wouldn’t recommend stopping donating as that could lead to the site disappearing to be honest this has always been an issue, both cogito and wreybies struggled with the same thing… for a long time we’ve made excuses for him and pandered to this behaviour but frankly I am all out of pandas… for one thing you deserve our honesty and for another it’s possible that public discussion might depth charge him to the surface. in terms of how much he would want to allow a take over, or what it might cost I don’t know because he’s gone radio silent. he’s also silent on Facebook and linked in and his other companies that we know about are dormant. we do have a mobile number which one of the US based mods will try when we have our ducks in a row ( that’s how we got the site back online after the hack) but even there results are not guaranteed
If we pooled our money together, could we members help the team buy the site? I would be willing to set aside around $100 for this for the near future (6 months?). But I don't know for how long I may have that kind of money left in my accounts. I'm looking at a pretty expensive past and future, and it's not looking super. A fresh, updated site may also be what's needed to retain more new members? For the glory of writing!
But wouldn't we miss out on all the collected information and knowledge of this site? And its google ranking? Its easy-to-google-name? The site's rich history? Some of the membership would probably be lost as well. It might be easier in the sense that it might be more doable, but a lot of value would be lost, I think.
Maybe, but it would all depend what Daniel thinks that is worth. The name is worthless though. You could easily just use writingforums with a different TLD. If you generate enough content, it wouldn't be long before you started to rank. Google knows when content is updated. I'm not suggesting anything one way or another. I'm just saying.
We don’t want to start from scratch because here we have 18 years and 60k of user database… without that we are tiny and the google rank will be negligible meaning new people wouldn’t find us and would all wind up going to .com instead As far as buying the site goes money isn’t the roadblock ( unless Daniel put a ridiculous price and then we wouldn’t want to pay anyway) the issue is the inability to have a sensible conversation with an owner who hasn’t been on line for over two years and with whom we only have a tenuous text contact We don’t want to push to hard via text in case that results in complete radio silence and an inability to deal with emergencies
Yeah, my first writing forum was FictionPost.com. It had similar ownership issues to this one and eventually the owner decided to just shutter it rather than transfer the ownership. Dunno why, but that's the call they made, with plenty of notice. Some of the mods started up a sequel site (and FP was pretty tiny) but it never picked up even a fraction of the original site's regular membership. I guess there were enough people on the fence already that a new URL and layout were enough to kill it off within a year or so. I'd love to see the de facto management take over for real here, but I wouldn't have high hopes for a new site.
