hogwash!: [theforum] Donation Wall - last chance to comment

William Anderson neuro at well.com
Sat Aug 23 09:49:09 CDT 2003


Russell Griechen wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> On another matter of the banners on Evolt...
> Without going overboard on loading the mother site...You could develop
> thousands of pages that are bookmarked from the front or subsequent Link
> pages with lots of content about niche interests and have those
> overpopulated to some extent and have other vendors that AdSense...though
> you would have to comply with their requirements.
> 
> Another would be to use the hosting company as a receptacle for diverse
> domain names that follow niche marketing interests.  That way you have the
> income, google will keep everyone of them indexed...because they would have
> the incentive to...and the main Evolt site is traveling at a reduced
> intensity.

These notions both disgust me, I'm sorry to say.  The number of times I've 
gotten fucked off at google results loaded with these pages filled with 
nothing but keywords designed to drag traffic to sites, which usually have 
nothing to do with what you were searching for and/or are built to redirect 
to URLs loaded with affiliate keys.  I can't think of anything more 
repellent for evolt.org to do, other than cold call people randomly from 
the phone book and hassle them to join if they have Internet access.

I agree with Rudy - it's great that people show interest in helping out, 
but when the suggestions are so massively over the top and out of tune with 
what we're trying to achieve, then I believe it's time for you to think 
about something different to suggest.

None of us - I apologise if I speak erroneously for anyone else - are 
interested in providing anything other than basic content hosting services 
for our users.  The value add really does come from the content we provide 
- years of articles, tips and software archival.  I don't think there is 
merit in reselling hosting, as all it will do is cause administrative 
headaches.  It's hard enough for us to find the time to administer the 
evolt.org sites as it is, why increase the load for something that's only 
supposed to support the community?

I'm still of the opinion that evolt.org has not, does not and will not 
exist to create a cash cow for people to profit from.  We've discussing 
seeking official non-profit status for evolt.org in the past, and I think 
there's merit in revisiting that at some point in the future.  I see no 
merit in generating more finances than are necessary to maintain the 
community and expand it in legitimate and useful directions.  Devolving 
evolt.org to a web hosting reseller sounds awful to me.

-- 
_ __/|   ___  ___ __ _________ "When Microsoft Office is your only hammer,
\`O_o'  / _ \/ -_) // / __/ _ \ pretty much everything begins to look like
=(_ _)=/_//_/\__/\_,_/_/  \___/ a nail. Or a thumb." -- Rob Pegoraro
    U - Ack! Phttpt! Thhbbt!     neuro at well dot com  http://neuro.me.uk/



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