Hi Mark,

I am sorry for the delay guys. As was mentioned, life has dealt me a few struggles as of late, which I won't get into here. If I understand the debate here, its a matter of whether the moderators should be compensated or not. Its a good question, and one that I think we could discuss until the end of time and never reach a conclusion on. The bottom line is that forums are largely volunteer run organizations.... no service level agreements... no commitments... nothing other than extreme interest in a hobby motivating a group of people to have fun learning and sharing about it. When forums become a paid subscrition entity, everything changes... if you have paid for a service, then you are entitled to that service. That means that the service needs to be available per stated service levels, that the service must escrow funds in order to be able to deliver the service over the period that was subscribed (someone mentioned annual subscriptions), etc. In short, everything changes.

As many of you know, I have been trying to get a photography business off the ground and thought long and hard about buying a very popular professional photography forum that came up for sale about a year ago. I talked to the owner and found that his selling price was a extremely high (way beyond anything I could afford without taking on a second mortgate), but moreover I learned that besides myself, there were two other interested parties... both of whom intended to turn the forum into a "for fee" forum. Prior to that time, there had been no advertising run on the forum, and there were no fees. Once the new owner stepped in (obviously not me), they immediately closed public access to a lot of it, and or put up annoying incentives, to get people to join the subscriptions. There was a lot of pushback from the membership, especially because it wasn't an existing member he bought it. Over time I don't believe they have generated a lot of income, and as far as I can tell they are NOT paying their moderators. They have made the site pretty annoying to visit if you aren't a paid member, and I've noticed a sharp decrease in traffic. If you visit now and aren't a member, you only get to see one line of each post in some of the forums... followedy by a "join and you can see the whole post" statement. In my case, the result was that I was pretty active there before the new plan was introduced, and I just stopped going there afterwards... there are other "free" options available.

When I started this forum, I decided that I would EITHER go with a donation based approach, OR, go with advertising.... but not both. I have stuck with that for the 6 years that the site has existed. There have been a number of occaisions when people wanted to offer donations to help support the site, and I have turned them down because of this policy. I don't believe its fair to do both.

Back to the paid moderator question. I believe that all the moderators have professional jobs where they make handsome salaries. If we were to go to an employee relationship, we would need to be able to compensate them enough to get enough of their time to make sure they were always available when they were needed. None of them are going to put any level of importance on this site if their day job, family, or any other priority above the site has an issue. So what happens if you are paying for the service, and one of the moderators goes on vacation for a month, or his dayjob sends him away for a 3 month project out of town? Unless we are paying him more than his day job, then I'm guessing we won't be seeing them for a while. That happens from time to time... we'll have an active moderator that disappears for a few months, then reappears with a different phone. This site doesn't now, nor will it likely ever generate enough income to pay salaries to people to the level that would be needed in order to operate in a manner that would make it a "service provider" type site. My prediction is that if we went to a fee based system and had paid employees operate it, we'd be out of business in less than a month. Number one, our traffic would drop off dramatically, resulting in diminishing returns on any fees collected. Second, I can't even imagine that we'd get anyone to work for what we'd be able to pay. I only know personally of one large forum that is operated by paid employees, although I'm sure there are more, and its a topic that is much more widely appealing than PDAPhones. I'm sure there are others, but not a lot that are stand alone operations. I guess my point is that when you go to a business model like what was described, it changes everything in the equation and I don't think it would hold water. Even if it did, I don't have the time to take on something that big... as has already been mentioned, I'm going through some personal stuff right now that makes me unable to spend as much time here as I'd like. That could happen to any moderator tomorrow.

The other thing that has been considered is to offer a subscription that gave some usability enhancements to the site... such as no-ads, PDA version of site, vendor discounts, etc. I have thought about this and not ever gotten to a point where I thought it would be worthwhile to do. One of the biggest reasons is I really don't want to be in a situation where I owe the users a level of service. That carries with it a 24x7 commitment to do things that is beyond what a forum typically owes its visitors.

Back to the situation with the phones for mods discussion. I don't see anything wrong with passing the plate to get a phone for a mod that is looking to work on learning it and fixing problems in it. I believe it was done before. BUT, you have to know that the moderators are still not obligated to deliver anything. Say you bought mrailing a new phone, and then two weeks later something came up in his life that required his attention... well guess what, I'm going to wager that he'd be jumping on that. So if there is going to be a "donation" made to buy them something, there need to be no strings attached. I would certainly support such a donation approach, and I'd be happy to help close the gap if less is given then needed. I believe the offer I made before was to match all the gifts made by members, up to half the value of the device.

Lets try to get this thread back on topic, as it really wasn't intended by the original poster to lobby for a fee based site with paid employees.

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Mike - Been Converged?