Kyleran said:
According to doofhoof, Craig made you an offer for the data, $7K, seems fair in light of everything.
So little understanding of business in the world, a failing of the education system apparently.
Here's a thought, maybe the community member who sold the site can buy the data back and donate it to the new site?
First, lets be clear, the community member who sold us out? Is no longer part of the community. That Judas betrayed both Craig and us. Now, onto the meat of the post.
What "business" world are you referring to? The community in question is made up of mostly older folks, we've been gaming since the 90's online, and have been a community now for 12+years. Most of us run our own businesses now, or are fairly established in "business".
Since you apparently think "being fair" or "trust" are important factors in "business", let me disabuse of that notion right now and save you some heartache and money in the future. The first term you should learn in any business venture is Caveat Emptor, buyer beware, it's so enshrined in Western society that precedents have been set up around it. It is up to YOU to do due diligence on your purchases, and on contracts you sign. Someone can't defraud you, yes, but the standard for that is incredibly strict--certainly it's not "I bought a business without checking my customer base and then they all left, this is unfair!"
Fair has nothing to do with it. It wasn't fair when Draegan (The site owner) sold us out, just like it wasn't fair that Craig got duped. We, however, did our due diligence and checked owner records and had members of the community placed to warn us--and we benefited from that diligence by avoiding being tangled up in a for-profit site admin (Which I'll explain below is unpalatable to us). Craig, on the other hand, seems to have either eschewed due diligence or purposely kept the purchase secret because he really did know what would happen and wanted to exploit the view numbers to sell adds at a higher rate under his network (You can believe either of those scenarios you want). The point is we didn't "expect" the world to be fair, and we were able to defend ourselves when it inevitably wasn't, when one of our community members tried to screw us over. So some advice? If you have this expectation of fairness in life, you're going to be miserable.
That all said, I'm sure Craig is a swell guy--he seemed amiable enough when he posted. And I'm sure he actually believed he would leave us alone, too. The issue is, Craig is a businessman (Remember what I said about the business world being unfair?)...As nice as I'm sure Craig is, the point of his efforts isn't to be kind, it's to put food on the table for his family. If you're in 'business' you have to keep this in mind with EVERYONE you meet...At the end of the day they are making money for people they love, and YOU are just a customer, client or partner that they derive money from. They will only be "fair" or "kind" to you in so much that it effectively benefits their primary motivation, which is to make money for their family. The second the relationship with you, interferes with that, the relationship with you will change so it no longer interferes with the money making.
One day, inevitably, someone would have taken one of our more blunt conversations on Rerolled and run off to twitter or some other social network and screamed about how MMORPG was involved with such a terrible site. It would eventually get back to Craig's advertisers, or some other interest, and Craig would be forced to bring the hammer down in terms of moderation on the site. Again, not because he's "mean" or a bad person--but because his primary goal is to make money, NOT be "fair" or "nice". He's under no obligation to us to do anything, at all, not even a little (We don't even purchase things from him, so he's not even bound under the thinnest of consumer protections, or any kind of quid pro quo to uphold his "deal". It would be immensely naive of us to simply take someone's word on that when again, he has a conflict of interest--he wants to make money.) Just as we're under no obligation to him, it would be ridiculous to think so, like trying to say you're under obligation to continue eating at a restaurant you like.
Does our view bend towards cynicism? Of course, but as I said, most of us now run our own business, we're older and we've learned the lessons life has had to teach the hard way. If we didn't have a site to go to, we would have just left and let the forum die and used one of the much more popular sites for watered down, mass market conversations (Like Reddit or the Chans depending on which kind of conversation.) The forum is only valuable because it is fundamentally different from other options, its a steady non-anonymous community which is dedicated to open discussion and frank discourse, and light moderation--not exactly a combination that is easy to find in today's easily offended world.
I wish Craig all the best, hopefully we can come to an arrangement, but you need to dispel yourself of "fair". There isn't a discussion of blocking adblock on this site because of fairness. Craig's not a bad guy, but you're being silly if he's not going to put himself and his family first, as I would expect of any rational adult.
