I'm going to try to help people understand a few more thoughts rattling around in my head.

First of all, I locked the petition thread because I didn't feel like arguing with all of you about my reponse. I could already envision 37 reponses to my response informing me in a self righteous way that I am stupid for ignoring the minority and not properly running my business in the "cusomter's always right" frame of mind. So I locked it - which is my way of saying "here's our position and this is not negotiable".

However the debate continues... so I will type more.

One of the things that I've struggled with is the inherent responsibility to provide a place where the Audi community can exchange ideas/information of all kinds (including FS) versus what a place like that should actually be worth (monetarily) from a user's point of view.

This analogy is going to be a stretch, but try to imagine for a moment a <b>free</b> eBay. Let's say eBay started out as a dicussion forum and that over time they realized that so many people hung out there and wouldn't it just be nice to give all the people an easy way to sell things too? And so they allowed selling <i>free of charge</i> because some of the users demanded it. Clearly not all users had been coming to this fictional eBay for the ability to sell (and indeed many people had no interest in it), but some people thought it had great utility and thus begun to expect it to be provided in perpetuity and for free.

See the problem? It is borderline out of scope for the fictional eBay and it is not a sustainable business model either. In this example eBay is providing a definite service in facilitating commerce and yet has no way to be properly compensated. Additionally it has strayed from its core, original mandate.

If you bring the analogy back to AudiWorld it fits pretty well. For 5 years the FS issue was pretty much on the back burner. There were a few issues here and there, but by and large it was kept under check and nobody was threatening to leave the site. Now all of the sudden people are ready to take up arms over the issue. And yet two indisputable facts remain: 1) This is not AudiWorld's core mandate (to provide a selling mechanism to the Audi community) and 2) We have, at present, no reasonable way to generate revenue for providing the service.

Please don't try to convince me or anybody else that the simple fact that a user views pages on the site is "payment" enough since they generate banner views for our advertisers. That is pretty weak.

So we've gotten much more vigilant about cracking down and enforcing the long standing rule against advertising in the forums. Along the way we found out that our classifieds totally suck and need to be replaced (and are close to being completed in a new format).

Our expectation is that the new classifieds will provide the exact utility that the users are looking for, i.e. an organized, intuitive way to view for sale items. These classifieds will also include some commerce aspects to ensure that AudiWorld is fairly compensated. There will always be free versions of ads, but the paid ones will be more prominent and have other pluses. This will be a positive for everybody.

We have pretty strong convictions that the forums would be better without FS posts and no amount of whining, bitching or even calm discussion is going to change that.

I think that every one of you knows that we are happy that you are AudiWorld readers and that you enjoy the site. It's pretty cool to think that many of you have such an attachment to us that you want a large stake in the creative and policy control of the site. We always listen to feedback, even if we can't promise to always take the suggestions and implement them.

Flame away, but this is the gospel for now.

 

You act like you're running a business or something :-P
I actually agree with you here
You obviously don't want business being taken from your sponsors and there is a fine line between what is and isn't detracting from their business
I do like being the first to see a nice set of rims for sale :-P
But I just can't wait to see the new classifieds

 

It's not much an excuse, but I do this on the side. I don't get paid for it.

Personally, I started doing this because I wanted to give back to the community that taught me so much.

The day that AudiWorld ceases to be fun, is the day that I stop working on AudiWorld. It hasn't gotten to that point, but I can say the last couple of days has been far from fun.

To be honest, I do get quite a bit from AudiWorld non monetarily. It has helped me in my career (being in the computer field) and I have taken a couple of trips, and driven cool cars, but certainly not enough to match the amount of work that I've put into it.

Anyway, back to coding and making the site better.

 

<i>BTW, the rationale behind this is NOT to protect the advertisers...</i>

 

J/K.......lol