jont- wrote:akirk wrote:Will there not always be a conscious awareness of the link in what people post?
Depends entirely on Rob. But given most of the value of ADUK is it's independence, it would seem strange to throw that away.
/devils advocate - how do we know you'll never sell this forum in the future if we spend lots of time building this up?
Very valid I work in the web industry and I do have a business which makes money out of owning websites...
However this has been set up at a personal level, not through that business and the hosting sits on servers belonging to my main business, so there is no direct link with my web owning business and no conflict anyway even if there were a link, I have no commercial interest in this sector. If anyone wishes to I would have no issue with it sitting within a non-profit organisation, however I don't have the time to set that up and my experience of charities (and I have founded / set up / run a number) is that they are a lot of overhead for often little benefit - especially when there is no money involved... This won't work by adding in lots of layers of red tape at an early (or any other!) stage.
reference IP - I am not entirely sure why Rob bought ADUK, there isn't huge commercial value int he IP any longer, there are certain legal rights now to have data removed, and as we see people can set up a new forum very fast (took me two hours yesterday) - forums are usually bought for the advertising stream, based on 6-12 months revenue... Rob seems to be saying he wants ADUK for the other pages and their 'google juice' however it brings unintended consequences for the forum users - in some ways ADUK and the forum are two parallel beasts...
I am happy to make a committment:
- I will fund this website through hosting / domains where possible (certainly not an issue now)
- If it grows big enough that it needs a different approach, then such an approach would be decided on by a wider group
- If it needs to make money at some point then that is valid, but to put the money back into the website, not for personal gain - if excess monies were to be made, then they could go into supporting driver training etc.
- It won't be linked to / owned by / run by / etc. any commercial organisation in this sector
- It should remain fully independent as that is its uniqueness...
my only caveat is that while it sits on my servers I need to play a role in the admin / technical side to ensure it doesn't affect my daily clients etc. - I am not intending particularly to 'run' the forum - Mr C-W is an admin on here for that purpose, and there will no doubt be a slightly wider moderating team over time - however my hope and intention is that it is as hands-off / independent / etc. as ADUK has been, with more effort in feeding interesting material than moderating what people do...
hope that reassures!
Alasdair