Scam artists really annoy me. (Film at eleven.)
Con men can be sexy and cute on TV and in movies. See also, Neal Caffrey.
In real life, not so much.
I'm on several hobby and fandom centric forums, like probably everyone else who's net savvy enough to have a DW or LJ account. Membership on these forums usually runs in the low thousands, with a few hundred users being fairly active. With one exception, every one of these non-commericial forums that I've been on has been able to run on a cheapy $10/month hosting plan. Toss in the cost of a snazzy domain name, and the worst budgeted forum can run for $12/month. (Toss in some savvy admins, and that cost drops back to ~8/month -- but then they actually want to license some nice forum software, so it evens out.)
About six months ago I joined a brand-new forum for an electronic gadget I own, the Nook Color. Right away there were things that were just a little off. The founder encouraged people to include banner ads in their posts on the B&N forums. He started in immediately with fund-raising, even offering premiums for people who donated x amount that month. He talked about wanting to have hundreds of thousands of members on the site eventually. He mentioned half a dozen other forums that he was thinking of starting, or would have started if he hadn't started this one. And in less than a month, he announced that he'd sold his Nook and was leaving the forum in the hands of a volunteer admin to go play elsewhere.
I blew it all off as an over-enthusiastic, somewhat flighty fanboy who really didn't know what he was doing. I figured he was probably shocked at the $300 or more the first fund-raising drive must have brought in, and there wouldn't be any more fundraising for at least a year.
Two months later he popped back in long enough to announce a nifty keen new premium for anyone who donated that month. I thought that was a little quick, but the forum was running vBulletin, and I don't blame him for wanting to break even on that.
Three months after that he announced that traffic was exceeding all his expectations, and the forum was moving to a dedicated server. Wait, what? The forum had about 1200 members, and was getting around 120 posts a day at the time. Image hosting was enabled, but very few people used it. The forum had been on godaddy, which while not the most reliable host in the universe, has an unlimited diskspace/bandwidth plan. And what hobby forum needs 100% uptime?
Almost immediately after the forum makes the move, the owner posts a poll asking who wants a chat function on the forum! And less than 24 hours later announces that nevermind, he's buying and installing the chat function anyway. Aha! That seems like a silly waste of money to me, everyone else I know just uses IRC. But if he can get people to pay for it, it's a shiny feature.
(The chat function was phased out less than a week later, when people said they didn't know how to use it.)
He's still fundraising, and people are still donating. Most of them are what I'd consider "new" to the internet, or just generally naive about technology. The Nook Color was by far the fanciest gadget most of them owned. Many of them are on facebook and maybe Linked In, but they'd never participated in a non-corporate blog or forum before.
Yesterday I finally got curious enough to poke around. The forum is on a "dedicated server", but it's one of at least 50 domains currently or recently hosted on the server. Okay... is it really a dedicated server if the server is dedicated to 50 different sites?
The owner is obviously a bit manic about running forums -- he's got at least one other actively running on that server at the moment. (A number of others had just been transferred off the server the Nook Color's forum is on to another.) It's also host to the forum owner's own website building and hosting service (dreamquestfactory.com - don't go to it, my antivirus claims it's infected), and currently has at least three customers' sites hosted on the server. I didn't get the rest of the details, because various sites were asking me $20+ for the information.
All of this seemed a bit disingenuous at best -- asking for donations for hosting funds for a server that's clearly used for commercial purposes.
Then I ran across this. Nice, isn't it? I wonder if Steve Job's estate has given the okee dokey for it? The forum owner has registered a domain that I can only assume he plans to use to advertise this lovely item: applestatue.com.
Recently, google ads were turned on for the forum. Yesterday the forum owner announced that there were two special user titles that users could purchase. One, for $30/yr, would last a year and include ad blocking. The other, for $50, would be permanent and block ads. People are already announcing that they've bought one, or will buy one as soon as they get their tax refunds, etc. (Did I mention that a number of the users are retirees or stay at home parents?)
A newer user to the forum asked in that thread why the hosting was so expensive. Here's the reply we got:
When we initially launched the club, we were on a "shared" hosting plan. But then we began to outgrow that very quickly... almost immediately! That's when I took us off the shared plan and onto the dedicated server program. I pay around $1,000 per month for my hosting package, which is actually a pretty good deal compared to what other companies charge. All of this, obviously, is not solely for ClubNOOK, though, but I just point that out so you know that the $10/month plans are not for things like this.
It's now officially scam territory. I certainly don't mind someone breaking even when they run a hobby forum or using a more popular forum to support a smaller one; I don't even mind someone making a little pocket change off a hobby site. But it seems pretty obvious that this is just one in a line of "get rich quick as lazily as possible" schemes.
I'd rat the guy out on the forum, but I doubt that most of the users would listen.
In real life, not so much.
I'm on several hobby and fandom centric forums, like probably everyone else who's net savvy enough to have a DW or LJ account. Membership on these forums usually runs in the low thousands, with a few hundred users being fairly active. With one exception, every one of these non-commericial forums that I've been on has been able to run on a cheapy $10/month hosting plan. Toss in the cost of a snazzy domain name, and the worst budgeted forum can run for $12/month. (Toss in some savvy admins, and that cost drops back to ~8/month -- but then they actually want to license some nice forum software, so it evens out.)
About six months ago I joined a brand-new forum for an electronic gadget I own, the Nook Color. Right away there were things that were just a little off. The founder encouraged people to include banner ads in their posts on the B&N forums. He started in immediately with fund-raising, even offering premiums for people who donated x amount that month. He talked about wanting to have hundreds of thousands of members on the site eventually. He mentioned half a dozen other forums that he was thinking of starting, or would have started if he hadn't started this one. And in less than a month, he announced that he'd sold his Nook and was leaving the forum in the hands of a volunteer admin to go play elsewhere.
I blew it all off as an over-enthusiastic, somewhat flighty fanboy who really didn't know what he was doing. I figured he was probably shocked at the $300 or more the first fund-raising drive must have brought in, and there wouldn't be any more fundraising for at least a year.
Two months later he popped back in long enough to announce a nifty keen new premium for anyone who donated that month. I thought that was a little quick, but the forum was running vBulletin, and I don't blame him for wanting to break even on that.
Three months after that he announced that traffic was exceeding all his expectations, and the forum was moving to a dedicated server. Wait, what? The forum had about 1200 members, and was getting around 120 posts a day at the time. Image hosting was enabled, but very few people used it. The forum had been on godaddy, which while not the most reliable host in the universe, has an unlimited diskspace/bandwidth plan. And what hobby forum needs 100% uptime?
Almost immediately after the forum makes the move, the owner posts a poll asking who wants a chat function on the forum! And less than 24 hours later announces that nevermind, he's buying and installing the chat function anyway. Aha! That seems like a silly waste of money to me, everyone else I know just uses IRC. But if he can get people to pay for it, it's a shiny feature.
(The chat function was phased out less than a week later, when people said they didn't know how to use it.)
He's still fundraising, and people are still donating. Most of them are what I'd consider "new" to the internet, or just generally naive about technology. The Nook Color was by far the fanciest gadget most of them owned. Many of them are on facebook and maybe Linked In, but they'd never participated in a non-corporate blog or forum before.
Yesterday I finally got curious enough to poke around. The forum is on a "dedicated server", but it's one of at least 50 domains currently or recently hosted on the server. Okay... is it really a dedicated server if the server is dedicated to 50 different sites?
The owner is obviously a bit manic about running forums -- he's got at least one other actively running on that server at the moment. (A number of others had just been transferred off the server the Nook Color's forum is on to another.) It's also host to the forum owner's own website building and hosting service (dreamquestfactory.com - don't go to it, my antivirus claims it's infected), and currently has at least three customers' sites hosted on the server. I didn't get the rest of the details, because various sites were asking me $20+ for the information.
All of this seemed a bit disingenuous at best -- asking for donations for hosting funds for a server that's clearly used for commercial purposes.
Then I ran across this. Nice, isn't it? I wonder if Steve Job's estate has given the okee dokey for it? The forum owner has registered a domain that I can only assume he plans to use to advertise this lovely item: applestatue.com.
Recently, google ads were turned on for the forum. Yesterday the forum owner announced that there were two special user titles that users could purchase. One, for $30/yr, would last a year and include ad blocking. The other, for $50, would be permanent and block ads. People are already announcing that they've bought one, or will buy one as soon as they get their tax refunds, etc. (Did I mention that a number of the users are retirees or stay at home parents?)
A newer user to the forum asked in that thread why the hosting was so expensive. Here's the reply we got:
When we initially launched the club, we were on a "shared" hosting plan. But then we began to outgrow that very quickly... almost immediately! That's when I took us off the shared plan and onto the dedicated server program. I pay around $1,000 per month for my hosting package, which is actually a pretty good deal compared to what other companies charge. All of this, obviously, is not solely for ClubNOOK, though, but I just point that out so you know that the $10/month plans are not for things like this.
It's now officially scam territory. I certainly don't mind someone breaking even when they run a hobby forum or using a more popular forum to support a smaller one; I don't even mind someone making a little pocket change off a hobby site. But it seems pretty obvious that this is just one in a line of "get rich quick as lazily as possible" schemes.
I'd rat the guy out on the forum, but I doubt that most of the users would listen.