I would have put this in front office but i cant start a new thread!
all you do is come on for a minute and closed threads.
in a thead you just closed the man father owns a (big) shop with about 5 workers. like others they trying to get business up, which honestly they doing great during these hard times. WHY does he have to talk to bing or whomever to do a group buy for painting cars… so nobody else can make money like bing unless he gets something out of it?
you close alot of threads for stupid ass reasons. i notice alot that when ppl start making a lil money on here Bing and whomever starts to push them to get vendor status and pay SON something. i was even mentioned months ago in a thread that SON is turning into a cash grab and its looking more and more like the truth!
DONT get me wrong membership fees for member section is understandable.
Not trying to get on anybody’s bad side here… but I mean really man think about it… Bing and Gonad and Spd Dmn run this website, they use there time and effort and probably even money to keep it going… would you really want to pay if you were doing that for other people to get free advertising?
Ya it is hard times and the guy is trying to get some more business… but its hard times for everyone and lets face it… NOTHING is free in this world.
Again not trying to start a battle. But that’s just my thoughts and rebuttal.
naw man its kool and i do understand that as well… i think if Gonad, Bing, and Spd-dmn really had an issue they would close it on there own… really its not even really about the ‘‘money grab’’ too much now that i think about it… just roast always closing threads for nothing!!
He’s also doing the community a favour by offering afforadable paint jobs. Isnt this what this site is for? to foster a tighter knit community of people with a common interest?
Ya i know there are costs involved in running a website, but there are paying advertisers already as well as other ways of obtaining money to cover running costs.
I mean fuck, we have to pay $10 just to access a few forums, unheard of on the internet. Im part of some of the biggest as well as smallest forums in the world and ive never been told i need to pay for access to a few areas of the site.
I also realizing advertising isnt always free, but this is in the interest of the community as well so i really dont see any harm in it.
If you don’t like it you are free to leave no? This site is run in a very orderly fashion and the system to date has not had any major issue’s. Let them stick to what they do and keep the site running smoothly.
The painting was a service, he should pay to advertise that if he would like. With the amount of people signing up it would be worth the measly cost.
It doesn’t cost that much to run a website… the domain is like $10 a year and the hosting is probably $20 a month at most. There isn’t enough traffic on this website to be paying huge bandwidth costs if you’re with a reasonable host.
The more users, the more threads, the more pictures, the more videos posted up the more it costs to keep a site running. Just my 0.02c on that part of the topic.
There’s no use fighting it, if that’s how things are then I’ll let it be.
I just figured I wouldn’t be doing any harm, because as far as I can see, there are no other body shops advertised on SON so I wouldn’t be stealing business for anybody who has paid for advertising.
I’ve contacted “roast” about becoming a “Vendor” on SON.
He needs to do a better job moderating this place though, my thread was up for a while before being closed.
Once again, thanks for bringing attention to what has happened.
In my opinion, he’s taking away from the SON240SX community by doing this.
we’ve always believed in openness and transparency. it was a LACK of these things that caused problems in previous years.
i think bing, myself, gonad and roast have made considerable inroads toward making this club a better place by having more stability, more organization, less infighting, etc.
users’ (yes, even unpaid users to some extent) opinions should always be expressed FREELY and threads like these are NEVER locked. in fact we encourage them.
i moved it to front desk because that’s where it belongs. i’m sure roast will reply himself once he gets the chance.
but for the time being,
it is out of respect for our current sponsors that we close commercial threads and ask people to remove commercial references from their sigs.
our sponsors pay money to advertise on this site because they see the amazing value we provide in terms of getting their service or product out to the community.
that having been said,
how fair is it to our sponsors when other businesses are allowed to offer their services for free?
the answer is it’s not.
the proper thing to do, vis a vis this paint group buy, would have been to approach one of us and asked if it was alright to post a commercial group buy.
i’m sure we would have- and still can - work something out if needed.
Actually I’ve set up quite a few websites for various people including others that host forums.
The forum software itself is the majority of the cost. It’s $180 USD for the software + one year of upgrades and an additional $60 each year after that for upgrades. (which still isn’t all that much when you think about it).
The .org domain name is never really more than ~$15 a year unless you’re going with some ridiculous registrar.
Also, this forum is hosted through DreamHost (www.dreamhost.com). Their services are extremely cheap. So unless whoever currently owns this site decided to go all-out and get some heavy duty (unnecessary for the amount of traffic on this website) dedicated server through DreamHost, they’re definitely not paying more than $20 a month for the hosting.
Junior, I don’t know what to say. Honestly, I’ve closed a few thread where someone is trying to make a buck by posting an ad for a business.
We’re in a tough economy and not only has my company laid off employee’s, my friends are now being let go. I understand that we need to pull together to ride out the financial downturn and I would love to help struggling business out but we’ve made a commitment to our current Vendors to give them advertising services (own forum, banners, group buys, etc) at son240sx.org. The fact that I closed/moderated his thread is well within reason to keep our current Vendors happy.
We’re the premier 240sx community for Southern Ontario, we have top notch vendors who satisfy each and every customer with professional service. We have thousands of registered users and we have users who exclusively come to SON to buy parts. Our vendors are visited, contacted and used by SON. We want to keep them happy as they add to the community.
Your buddy, krayzie94 can talk to Bing/Mike/Gautam to become a vendor, I PM’d him and let him what I did and why. He know’s to contact Bing or Mike to become a vendor and can explore if SON is a fit for his business.
For the most part, no harm done. I don’t think our current vendors would lose direct revenue by advertising a group buy on paint jobs because, you’re right, none of them are in that business. If your ad re-directed potential revenue away from, let’s say an SR swap, then yes, you did harm their business.
If you become a vendor, it’s up to you to market your product and pull business in off this site. We’ll provide banners, forums, group buys, etc. But, you have to make sure SON is the right fit for a body shop.
There’s too much on SON for one person to solely moderate. If I enforced every single rule, I’d have a third full time job. You have to understand, each one of the admins work full time and volunteer our free/spare time to run this website [read: none of us get paid.]
I can see your intentions are good but maybe you were a little over zealous. If you took your thought process one step further and put our current sponsors/vendors shoes on, I don’t think you would have made your group buy post without contacting an admin.
You opinion is welcome, same with Junior’s and anyone else. We setup the front desk so that people could express their concerns with SON.
How the community perceives you is none of my business. If you come off as unprofessional, that’s your problem, not mine.
It’s funny to me that the least professional post in this thread was the one which the business owner posted
The way I see it - if you have a problem with the way things are run here then don’t visit the site - nobody is forcing you to. If you don’t read the rules, don’t get offended when your thread gets locked.
Roast does an outstanding job here and has been a major contributor in turning this place around from a shit hole in to a respectable community over the past 2 years with lots of great vendors - all of which were more than happy to contribute funding to the club in exchange for advertising.
now im talking overall… not just about vendors and what not
Roast thanks for that detailed reply!!
okay i understand what you saying when it comes to other vendors and whatever. I said before that SON is a great site. I dont know how much it cost to run cause i simply dont know how to run a forums.
Something i dont agree with is video’s being moved… Right now I am in flight school, so if I post a video of me taking off or landing, etc… to show everyone I happen to know thru SON and I want to show my progress to them… most may not see it cause ‘‘videos’’ are members only type thing.
Mike and Rich have done a great job explaining why things are carried out the way they are on here so i wont bother to double post it.
With respect to paying for elevated access on SON, this is very common place on hundreds of web forums across the internet, Zilvia for one.
SON, since the change in management and ownership, has been the busiest it has ever been with the most vendors it has ever had and the most events in its history. Using those as the benchmarks the site and the community have never been better.
The costs of running the site are irrelevant. This is not a charity and it cannot be run at a net loss. Having funds in reserve allows us to invest in promotional or event related activities which we have and will continue to do in the future.
Donated monies and the dollars from sponsoring vendors are reinvested in the community 100%. There isnt enough revenue on SON to make it worth while for anyone to be dishonest about.
having funds results in contests!!!giveaways and prizes, well thats what happens on some forums the generate a little more revenue then necessary.
This would be super cool if this happened on SON.
ohh and if u think 10$ is bad… the Ontario corvette club charges $120 annually. I laughed when the guy told me that.
What does that say? Personal, not commercial. So therefore, in a “legal” sense, as a “loop hole” he is not at fault.
Yet, like everyone has stated; Advertising is not free. Regardless if your service is offered on this site by another company/persons or not.
To me, it is thus very very simple.
Personal classifieds = any service or part/s for sale by an INDIVIDUAL. Not a company. I’m not sure (I have not had the chance to read through krazis??? thread) whether he was advertising his personal service or the service or the company. Also, if the business name was NOT mentioned. No fault of his.
If all is as I stated above, the thread should be allowed. If not, lock it up. Become a vendor, pay your dues, then rake in the cash.
To krazi; honestly. Paint, here. Not so good. I may be being a bit harsh when I say this. Yet, SONlings are constantly talking shit. How they are going to get/buy something, or help someone and what have you. Then, when the times comes…fa lop!
Although, there are enough SONlings that are mature enough to take advantage of your service.
I also heard, you were advertising your service with no pictures of pervious work? Wether your ad was legal or not…that shit won’t fly with no one.
