Forum Moderators: rogerd
Any thoughts in regards to how this is going to help or hurt those of us who have the smf forums?
Reading through some of the postings it appears some are upset over this. Their concern, legitimate, is how is a vbulletin community going to help an smf webmaster community?
If you did join the SMF users forum (or webmsters forum as you refer to it), then your account info is now in the hands of a new party. SMF allows a user to self-delete their account, I don't know if vB does. I had my account for a few hours and amade a few posts before self-deleting once I figured out what was up at this forum.
Their concern, legitimate, is how is a vbulletin community going to help an smf webmaster community?
I had concerns about how the original one (using SMF) would do that. I see it as more about the people than the forum software--a lot of webmasters are helped significantly here, but I bet few of them run BestBBS.
It does raise interesting questions around building a community and then selling it off. This was a situation where the original community attained several hundred members in a day when the owner sent invites out to a list harvested from other boards. In my view this was somewhat successful because of a bit of social engineering. The invite was presented as "exclusive" (hardly the term I'd use for spamming thousands of addresses, altheough they did appear to be hand-picked from other SMF boards where webmasters would hang out, including the official SMF community).
I don't think there's anything wrong or deceptive about that, although the owners of the boards whose members were harvested may see it differently. Invites were email, not using the board's PM system, so really anyone who didn't expose an email address would never be bothered.
The amazing part is that the original owner flipped the board less than ten days after sending out that mass invite. You have to wonder if that was the original plan, or just a serendipitious offer.
I was a member on smfusers and I also saw it was for sale on digital point, precharge was just the highest bidder like anyone else could have been. it was a nothing forum at first and now it's huge. precharge seems to be very reputable which anyone can see so i tdont think they had anything to do with the board before this, but for sure they knew how to manage the success of it becuase now everyone is talking about it. They've even acquired other boards since then and it's only created a craze. I cant wait to see what forum they buy out next.
[edited by: Daffy528 at 6:28 am (utc) on Aug. 12, 2006]
