[Lingster]

Excellent.  Thread closed.

[Lingster]

I don't think you're a stupid person at all.  I do think you're angry about something else and "acting out."

[Lingster]

Well, there are no pay site ads in the forum but they're still on other sections of the site.  You're correct that they pay the bills.  Misty Anderson's site and Fitness Centerfolds are the only ones I advertise that have sexual content – Misty Anderson's is no-nude, but FC has some nudes.  I'm not married to FC, and may drop it due to poor performance.  Misty Anderson, on the other hand, is very popular and has good retention, so there's no way I'm dropping her.  Misty is our benefactor.  And there's far raunchier content in numerous forum posts here than in any ad I've ever shown.

Likewise, AdBrite text ads will be clean as soon as the next cycle starts – I may add them to the forum at that time.  Google ads are completely clean, so I have no problem sticking them everywhere they fit.  (though Google gets mad if you put more than three ad scripts on a single web document).

[Lingster]

I have enough problems without people inventing new ones out of whole cloth, TC2.

[Lingster]

You mean invisibility when you're online? 

In your profile, under Modify Profile:Account Related Settings, you'll see:

"Show others your online status?"

Just click it to be visible when you're online.

[Lingster]

Oh, crud.  I should have thought of that. 

By how much does it exceed the limit?

[Lingster]

OK, fine.

1. Ads for pay sites, aka "sex ads"

[Lingster]

There's a Fiction section, the same as always.  Guests can't see it, signed-in users can. 

Can you see it?

[Lingster]

That's the good stuff.

[Lingster]

Three points:

1. You need to understand that it costs me time and money to do what I do here, and that my sole motive for this expenditure is that I enjoy it.
2. When I come up with ideas that will increase the reward in enjoyment and/or cashflow that I receive from doing this, I will pursue them.
3. Within the constraints of those first two points, I try to be as flexible, responsive and courteous as I can be.

I am willing to delegate nearly all authority regarding the content and conduct of this forum, but "structural" issues like whether I place ads on it, the URL where it lives, the kind of database it uses, etc, are entirely up to me because I am the one who bears the expense and the responsibility of maintaining it and growing it. 

Your objection to the "sex ads" was overheated and silly – you don't have to look at them. The decision to keep "sex ads" off the forum was revenue-negative for me, but I chose it anyway because I didn't want to offend forum readers.  That you were eager to take offense regardless is a mark against you, not me.  Users can bookmark the forum and log in here, so after the first visit to the site there is no need to ever load the front page again if the user doesn't want to.  As it stands now, only Google AdSense ads are shown on the forum, and Google polices those ads for objectionable content.  (I'm pretty sure you have no general objection to buxom, scantily-clad young ladies flexing their muscles and posting the photos on the internet, so I'm not even sure what got your dander up about the front page.)

Regarding the number of boards and their topics, I am entirely open to change in those areas.  The forum clearly needed expansion as part of the move, and I made the best guesses I could, based on topics that I see discussed here and on similar forums.  I expect there will be quite a bit of change in the topics over the next few months, just as there was considerable fluidity at She Grew! in the months after it launched last year.  These things take time, and there's no quick way to get it right.  My good choices will thrive and possibly split into multiple boards; my bad choices will wither and be cut.  Moderators and forum members will suggest new forums, some of which will be tried – they will go through the same life cycle as the ones I came up with.  I've never been rigid about topics or format before and I'm not sure what I did that merited being accused of it this time.  The likely answer is that you haven't been part of our merry band long enough to know me, and you didn't make an attempt to learn about my reputation before you popped off.  Most of the regulars here trust my judgement because I've done right by them numerous times over the last ten years.

I had to make this move – I lost confidence in Webair and and concluded that continuing to host She Grew! at Webair was a significant operating risk.  The compressed database alone was 16 mb with 6500 users, and there was a fair amount of MySQL and PHP reading that I had to do before I was ready to make the move.  I did a trial run on a test site the week before I did the move here – planning, testing and execution were very time consuming.  The Mambo and SMF cascading style sheets had to be reconfigured to avoid conflict, which require a test installation of the forum here at Amaz0ns the day before the actual move, which in turn required a full db backup of Amaz0ns and a file backup, too, since Mambo code had to be altered.  I performed the actual move in the most cautious and courteous way I could – all posts, private messages and user ids were preserved, and the outage lasted less than twelve hours.  The actual move took only two hours but I spent three hours double checking my work beforehand and then several hours testing the site before I reopened it – I took a personal day to do all this.  I've spent time over the last three days helping the handful of people who have had trouble logging in. 

These were not easy things to accomplish.  I'm not Yahoo.  I don't have an IT staff or a design staff to help me out with things like this.  I have to rtfm and carefully experiment.  I still have not mastered Mambo or SMF – I learn new stuff every day.

If someone had valid, substantive criticisms about the way I performed the move, even though those criticisms were in the "structural" realm, I would listen to them without complaint.  So far no one has offered any.

[Author]

Posts