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

[Martin Burns]

On Saturday, August 23, 2003, at 01:24 PM, Russell Griechen wrote:

> Martin, I am still smarting from your suggestion that I would hack the
> server down.
> It reminds me of schoolboys, grasping at straws to use to club someone 
> who
> had the audacity to attack the status quo.

To further comment on this:
1) You've failed to understand (or worse: have deliberately ignored) 
the difference between a reference to a historical event and an 
accusation of future intent
2) I know plenty of schoolboys who understand that bringing up closed 
and apologised for subjects is petty and diminishes the likelihood of 
being taken seriously
3) You've conveniently ignored that I've been somewhat supportive of 
some of your ideas
4) I think my record as a non-acceptor of statii-quo just because they 
are such is reasonably well established.


> Now lets get on with the plan.

To summarise as I understand it:

1) You think evolt.org should offer large-volume commercial hosting
2) You think that we should spend a lot more effort selling advertising 
to the extent of making substantial changes in the site design to 
maximise banner revenue.

I think they're both non-starters except in very limited ways.

We're not a hosting company (nor an organisation like f20 that offers 
developer space as a community service), and as you note, the bottom 
has largely fallen out of the hosting market. Offering community tools 
that happen to use space and bandwidth is a very different model. Also, 
the level of billing organisation required to support any large-scale 
hosting operation is just not going to happen with evolt.org's busy 
volunteers.

The bottom has also fallen out of the advertising market. I don't mind 
putting together a limited test that piggy-backs on what we're already 
doing, requiring no more than making space in a template design, but I 
really do not want to distract the 'making evolt better' redesign that 
we're currently doing to refocus it on commercial advertisers. To put 
it another way, I think there's almost nil chance of finding the time 
to develop the thousands of pages you recommend.

Cheers
Martin

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