So without knowing me, my beliefs, my financial situation, or quite frankly anything else about me, you've made quite a big assumption about me sitting on a forum "arguing" instead of donating money to a charity?
That's almost in the same league as "I have a dream...", "We choose to do these things..." or "Never have so many..." - but just as much as it succeeds on emotion, it fails on conviction. Largely because for all this 'hands up in horror' talk of assumption, you're only one sentence away from joining-in....
Get a grip mate, this is a thread about a feature on the forum that is currently quite broken, and is now going off at a rediculous tangent beacuse of you.
Or, "Get a grip mate, this thread WAS about a feature of the site which had some reliability issues, but between 'whinge-bumps' has seen some repairs, rendering the thread little more than your scratching post."
It seems to me that the admin of this forum (who it would seem has absolutely no interest in the Audi marque or this community) decides what he personally wants without care for anything the site users or even the moderators would like to see happen. If thats the case the real question is what is he getting out of it? If he has no interest in the marque or the community, why is the board still here? Is it just a nice cash cow?
WOAHOHOAH! And there it is! (Look, you've made TWO assumptions (generally "seems" is an operator of assumption) before the end of your brackets...
So, even though we have been through this before (and I'd just like to take a moment to applaud your cute dedication to buzz-words in your moaning-attacks - "cash cow" was I think exactly what you called ASN last time), we'll look at your assumptions again...
It's interesting, because (and just so this is comprehensive, I'll say this applies to both Adam and myself) what you've said is true - just to a point. That point being the moment at which you gleamed your hypothesis from the evidence...
You're right, neither of us have very much to do with the Audi marque on a day to day basis, Adam spends most of his time in a Jeep, and even now I'm sat in a Passat; but that doesn't really afford you to make the assumption that we therefore have no interest in the community. Surely the fact that even though neither of us have a fleet of Audis on the drive at the moment, but still invest time and money keeping the site running could be just as much an indicator that we must really care about the community? If we don't drive Audis, surely there can be no other reason to be running the site?
Oh no wait, that's it, it's because it's a Cash Cow - that's why we do it! I'm sitting in a gold plated Passat, posting on two (f**k it, I can afford it) diamond encrusted Laptops, lubricating my typing fingers with Caviar. Adam would be here to back me up but he's currently on an expenses-paid fact-finding mission somewhere in the South Pacific investigating how many Audi drivers there are on the average six-star cruise ship. As soon as he's back at ASN HQ in Monaco, I'll get him on here. You clown.
I think it's fair to say ASN isn't exactly swamped with things designed to dredge money from the poor unsuspecting users... In fact, we've a couple of banner-ads at either end of the page, and some sponsored forums (which lets be honest have just as much potential to be places where users can get good advice for free as the other areas of the site). I'm not going to get into numbers or reasons here, but I can honestly say that this isn't bringing-in anything like the funding which it could, or should, at the moment - and that's something which needs to be sorted out, however - i) we're spending all the time we can spare on maintaining and upgrading the site with higher priority, basically choosing to miss out on some revenue and therefore making larger contributions to overheads ourselves because we'd rather fix and add shiny, new, better stuff first, and only once that's done spend the time working on the coffers; and ii) even when the pen-pushing is done, and there's more showing on the ledger from advertising income, it still won't put us in profit a) because of the actual numbers and b) because we've always said what comes in willl always go back into the site. Even before we get to paying for things like the 'show' we put on at shows (as we started to in 2009), there are things like rental of a dedicated server, some bolt-on hardware options and the bandwidth it chews through on a monthly basis - and we're using a surprising (given the nature of the site) amount of premium (ie low-contention, not this "unlimited" s**t a lot of hosting companies palm folks off with) bandwidth. In 2009 and 2010 so far we're into thousands (GBP) spent on software - purchase/licencing/development. Then there are sundries and exceptionals on top - phone calls between folks running the stuff behind-the-scenes probably accounts for a good chunk of air-time (I could probably come off my £75pm (+ extras) line rental package if I could do all the communication required to run ASN in front of a computer, for free (and just in case we're on the verge of another couple of assumptions - ASN does not contribute to my, or anyone else's phone bill; and none of us begrudge it )). After that we're left with things more etherial like time - again, despite what you might('ve) assumed, none of us begrudge the time we donate (and we fullly understand the definition of the word 'donate') - in fact we probably all share the wish that we had an extra hour or two on the day for ASN.
So, to think that we're only in it for the money, and that we don't give a flying f**k about the Audi(-Sport.net) community can only, as far as I can work out, come from being either ill-informed (which you certainly aren't now, but I doubt you were even before this post, given that the discussion here between you and I isn't the only one to have ever taken place), desperately stupid, or a tragically cynical cretin. Whichever, you've got the straight facts above. I'll swear on whatever book you like that all the above is accurate, hopefully that's good enough. If you still think that we're all about fleecing people after reading it, well, that's up to you - my only request in that case would be that you **** and moan about it somewhere else.
Anyway, getting back on topic briefly (because there's not much more needs to be said about this at the moment), and to the Classifieds...
1) Just as much as you and a few others can see disadvantages to the current Classifieds set-up, and advantages to a more basic 'selling in a forum' type arrangement, some (us included) can see disadvantages to selling in the forums, and advantages to the current set-up.
2) Yes, the Classifieds system has suffered some pretty grim reliability issues; it has recently had some work which will hopefully resolve that, so it meets functional requirements at least - if not ideal aesthetics...
3) Yes, aesthetically the Classifieds system could be better, and more organised; that's on the cards too - but now it's been patched to the point it should be more reliable, it's not the most important thing with a requirement for man hours around here. Once some other things are sorted out, we'll be back to the Classifieds to work on things like the layout and organisation of categories.
4) You're right, it's not perfect at the moment, but as in 1-3 above we've got a handle on the situation, and changes are on the way. In the meantime, as you feel so aggrieved, we'll happily refund any money you've paid us to list items in the Classifieds. I'll write a cheque for £F**K.ALLp now, just let me know where to post it.
5) You're right, it'd be a REAL ballache to do a 'garage clearance' type sale in there. Perhaps a) we'd rather it didn't become a garage/boot-sale/jumble type place anyway, and b) if you really wanted to, you could spend a fraction of the time you have moaning, typing "eBay" or "Craigslist" or "Gumtree" into Google in the hope that maybe, just maybe, there's somewhere better suited to that kind of thing lurking on t'internet.
...In short...
The Classifieds as-is isn't ideal, but (albeit as of quite recently) it should be pretty reliable, there's no charge for using it, people don't have to use it; and as has been said (and to some extent proved by the fact we've already spent a while swearing at it to get it working better), it is an area we plan on refining and improving - but perhaps not with the immediacy you unfortunately feel owed.
Please, just have a day off (give it a rest at least until the next round of repairs/changes/upgrades to the Classifieds happen...)
Cheers,
Rob.
