Poll: Who Killed FAS?

[diger7]

Yeah, well I posted that a month ago!! 

I wasn't a WP Cheerleader! 

[misteroriginal]

[quote author=diger7 link=topic=141.msg1653#msg1653 date=1126875393]
Yeah, well I posted that a month ago!!   

I wasn't a WP Cheerleader!   
[/quote]

I didn't say you were a WP cheerleader, but you must admit you wasted a lot of time talking to Ray.

[vitalfinds]

[quote author=misteroriginal link=topic=141.msg1654#msg1654 date=1126875920]
[quote author=diger7 link=topic=141.msg1653#msg1653 date=1126875393]
Yeah, well I posted that a month ago!!   

I wasn't a WP Cheerleader!   
[/quote]

I didn't say you were a WP cheerleader, but you must admit you wasted a lot of time talking to Ray.
[/quote]

Well talking to Ray or any one of his pom pom carriers was an interesting study in psychology which can be interesting - but yes, was ultimately a waste of time.

By the way Mr. O, what would you like to see change on fas?  Visi to come back?  Mods to go away?  Fire away ... I can take it like a man.   >

[bargainbloodhound]

[quote author=vitalguy link=topic=141.msg1656#msg1656 date=1126880755]
  Fire away ...I can take it like a man  >
[/quote]





 

[misteroriginal]

[quote author=vitalfinds link=topic=141.msg1656#msg1656 date=1126880755]
... I can take it like a man.   >
[/quote]

I appreciate your honesty, Mister Vitalfinds, but I haven't left FAS. I check it almost every day, but I haven't seen much worth commenting on lately.

I HATE BBH. Always have, always will. But he/it has a wonderful arrangement of topics. Even if a thread is empty, it is very clear to me where to post a thought about ecommerce when it crosses my mind.

Matt neglects FAS. He's a great guy and a skilled programmer, without a doubt. BUT he doesn't seem to know people that well. BBH (the jerk) seems to have a much better sense of when to step in and when to leave a situation alone.

Finally, I've got a kid to feed. I can't wait forever for Matt to carry through on his promises to fix FAS. I'm not sure he can even if he wants to. With only 63 members (last count), the discussions on TulipTools have already been much more challenging to my brain in the past few days than FAS has been in the past month with 4000+ (auction site?) members.

Visi stunned me with his combination of talent and childishness, so that's something I'd like to forget.

[accentnepal]

Does not seem dead to me. Perhaps in comparison with the height of the Waggle era, when the posts were coming as fast as you could read them. Seems more social now, and yea, a little dull.

I learned a whole lot during Waggle - things to do and things not to do. Still think there is a lot of good information in that topic -- but I did not invest much time in preparing templates and stuff so when it croaked I only lost some dreams. But Wagglepop was by far the biggest event on FAS. It all but built FAS, it would be a lot smaller now if not for the Waggle, so is that blame???

As for Matt ---what is this sense that he is obligated? He had some serious work on his degree and some serious family issues. Other than letting the domain expire (minor screw-up) I do not see where he needs to be there. We are adults (OK, few exceptions) and although there was a little spamming the board managed without him. Remember, Matt is doing FAS for FREE - at least he has said that he donates anything beyond costs. He has other obligations.

[misteroriginal]

[quote author=accentnepal link=topic=141.msg1690#msg1690 date=1126938558]

As for Matt ---what is this sense that he is obligated? He had some serious work on his degree and some serious family issues. Other than letting the domain expire (minor screw-up) I do not see where he needs to be there. We are adults (OK, few exceptions) and although there was a little spamming the board managed without him. Remember, Matt is doing FAS for FREE - at least he has said that he donates anything beyond costs. He has other obligations.
[/quote]

If you build it, and they come, you have obligations.

[bargainbloodhound]

[quote author=misteroriginal link=topic=141.msg1692#msg1692 date=1126939734]

If you build it, and they come, you have obligations.
[/quote]

I'll partially disagree.

If you build it and people signup you do have an obligation to notify them if you plan on tearing it down.  In 2001 we shut down large parts of our AllMusicSearch site (and several of our other sites) because we couldn't afford to keep them running--and so the 1500 registered users on the AMS auctions and 800 on the AMS message boards were notified well before we shut those sections down (and after we shut them down we deleted the member lists). We felt an obligation to notify everyone beforehand, but we didn't feel an obligation to go bankrupt by keeping what we had built running. 

I don't think that just because Matt built FAS he is obligated to update FAS, keep it free of spammers and scammers, or keep it running, BUT since he has built people's hopes up numerous times with promises that he is planning a new FAS he does have an obligation to tell people if he drops the plan (and since he has told people it will be ready "next week or next month" every time he has appeared since April, I do feel he should have appeared to say "it won't be ready next week/month" instead of just stringing people along for the past 5 months).

[vitalfinds]

I agree with Mr O, and I do think that Matt has really fallen down on the job lately.  I think it's great that he's now realized that he needs a little help and has asked for it, but it sure took a long time.  I also agree with BBH in that if it's really a situation where it's takling you down, then you probably need to shut down or change the way things are. 

I wouldn't be surprised, for instance, if sometime in the future, we begin to see fees for joining forums - and in a lot of ways, I wish this would happen.  In other words, although I can understand someone shutting down, it would also piss me off that I had invested so much time at a certain forum only to learn later that the owner of the forum hadn't thought things out financially to begin with, so rather than have all these "flighty" volunteers owning furims, it might turn into a situation where the forum would be stable due to knowing the the owner was bringing in some income to cover the expenses and maybe even make a profit.  I hope that all makes some sense.

[Nat]

If you build it, and they come, you have obligations.

If you build a site, yes you have obligations - to either stay and keep it up and if you can't then appoint someone else to help out or take over, or close it down.  Don't just leave a site hanging like that.