Playtent wrote:Mr Cholmondeley-Warner wrote:I think Darren always had that ambition - to supplement / replace / subsume the AD qualifications available by offering his own. A laudable ambition, even if a bit of a pipedream, certainly from a hands-off standpoint.
I wonder why he didn't make it known that he was looking to move on so others could have considered the challenge.
Just curious for when you sell my posts to Brake, who's is this now?
There is an irony here in that I tried to get hold of Darren to see if he needed help with ADUK - even offering to buy the forum if that was necessary to keep it running as it was - but couldn't get hold of him...
However, in response to a careless comment I made and then a conversation with Mr CW I set this up last night - registering the domain (and .co.uk) and putting up the hosting on one of my servers / installing PHPBB3.1 (so that there is familiarity but it should be mobile responsive as well) and then making sure that Mr CW was promoted to admin so that we had someone with wisdom and discernment behind the scenes
So technically I own the domains / hosting / forum - but I hopefully cover that on page three of this thread - for me the value is in its independence, and I don't want to run the forum commercially - ideally I would prefer not to have adverts / etc. I would like it to be about the community and the discussion / the online and offline meeting of minds (agreement and disagreement!)
ADUK seemed to have two sides to it - the forum and the rest, from his comments Rob was buying it for the non-forum bit to give him 'google juice' (i.e. links and SEO) to drive traffic to his commercial organisation - it can be a very cheap way (if the price is right, and Darren's reply suggests it was) of buying traffic - I suspect that Rob wanted the link power, and possibly maintaining the forum came as a price to keep the overall cost down - i.e. maintain Darren's vision and it is a cheap purchase / buy it for the links not the forum and it is more expensive...
Some of the best forums I have seen though manage to avoid the temptation to go for huge numbers at the expense of quality of content - lower numbers but higher quality contribution is key (though that might be too much to ask for
) - then the costs of running the forum are not as high, so less advertising / income is needed - or an individual can afford to fund it (as I am) - hopefully this makes it a better community - the minute you start to bring in advertising, it brings expectations and change with it...
Alasdair