Script Owners / Reps And Programmers - Where Are They All?

[Lee]

Has anyone else noticed a real lack of participation from the companies selling scripts and programming services on the gay industry message boards?

The only person i can actually think of, off the top of my head that does post regularly on gay industry boards would be Ray from StrongBox.

Why do you folks think this is, fear, profitability, homophobia, something else?

These types of individuals seem to be posting pretty much 24/7 on the straight webmaster boards, why so little participation from them on the gay boards?

Regards,

Lee

[AcidMaX]

Honestly I believe many of the straight companies have no idea how much money there is in the gay side of this business. Not to mention I honestly think many of the gay program owners are much more business savvy than many of the straight program owners, they just think things through more.

With that being said, I am sure there are a lot of programmers who lurk on this board. I am a programmer have been in the industry since about 1998.

Over the years I have found that most solutions you are better of just hiring someone to write the app and maintain it for you then to try and suffer using a cookie cutter type system. It costs you more money in the long run due to time, modifications etc., than if you just did it right the first time, the way you want it.

[raymor]

This is GAY wide WEBMASTERS, so some people may not be sure how welcome they would be if they are neither gay nor webmasters. I know
I didn't participate much, and still don't as much as on other boards because
of that. I tend to stick to threads where I'm uniquely qualified to help and let you guys have your board when it comes to general business discussions.
I don't want to be seen as a "carpet bagger" or whatever coming into a
place where I don't really fit in just to promote a product or service. I bet if
knowledeable professionals were invited they'd show up.

I'm sure market share has something to do with it, too.
With so many boards nowadays and so little time people have to
choose which board(s) they are going to partipate in regularly
and may try to choose the two biggest ones or whatever.


(BTW I actually have more posts than this but I seem to have lost my
old log in details, so I made a new account).

[raymor]

I thought of another possibility. I think I've registered here three times.
I guess you automatically remove members who haven't posted for a while.
It may be that people involved with software, hosting, etc. but not running
a gay site don't have need to post very often. When they do go to post,
they find that they can't log in and they don't bother to re-register in order
to make one post. There have been probably six more threads or so I would
have posted in had my own account been active. Extending the time before
an account is removed may keep more of the support people like designers
and technical people around.

[Lee]

Extending the time before
an account is removed may keep more of the support people like designers
and technical people around.

Extending the time wouldnt do anything to help with getting programmers, designers, etc participating, in all honesty, if you hadnt received your BoardTracker alert because i mentioned your name and StrongBox in my original post, would you have even seen this thread?

Thats my point, the gay webmaster community is constantly over-looked by these types of service providers and the ones we do have (with exceptions), dont contribute by just offering drive by spams when they notice a thread (sent through BoardTracker) mentioning 'i need a designer' or 'im looking for a script like MPA' etc... Enter Oystein stage left LOL

Regards,

Lee

[raymor]

Extending the time wouldnt do anything to help with getting programmers, designers, etc participating,
...
Thats my point, the gay webmaster community is constantly over-looked by these types of service providers and the ones we do have (with exceptions), dont contribute by just offering drive by spams when they notice a thread (sent through BoardTracker) mentioning 'i need a designer' or 'im looking for a script like MPA' etc... Enter Oystein stage left LOL

Regards,

Lee

Lee, perhaps I misunderstood your original post as a question when perhaps
it was intended as a rant or something. All I can do is answer your questions
based on my own knowledge and experience. Factually, the reality is that
there have been several threads where I felt that I could contribute, but was
too busy at the time to try to figure out why I couldn't log in and then
re-register, wait for the confirmation email, etc. If you don't believe me
or something I guess that's your business. All I can do is share what I know.
I was trying to be helpful and tell you what I could about the topic, but I
guess maybe that's not what you were looking for.

I suppose when we're pissed sometimes we just want to rant and that's cool.
Later, after we're done ranting, we realize that as long as "they" are the
problem we're screwed because we can't do anything about "them".
Only when we look at our end can we do anything to change anything.

in all honesty, if you hadnt received your BoardTracker alert because i mentioned your name and StrongBox in my original post, would you have even seen this thread?

I don't have time to read ANY boards regularly just looking around.
There are just too many boards and too many post on each to keep up.
Instead, what I do is use tools to help me find threads where I might be
able to contribute. That's important enough to me that along with
Boardtracker I wrote my own software which watches for posts mentioning
topics that I am qualified to help with or which interest me. I wrote this
custom tool so that I can participate and I normally read and probably
post when a topic comes up that interests me or that I can help with.
This is the same for ALL boards - gay, general, small, large, whatever.

There is only ONE difference between gaywidewebmasters and the other ones
insofar as my participation. The one difference is that I can't put gaywide
in my list of boards to be searched by my custom tool because it keeps
generating errors every time you remove my account. Personally I've
signed up three times. You keep deleting me and when I do post trying to
help answer your questions you call me a liar then wonder why I don't post more?

[raymor]

I forgot to directly answer your question.
No. I would not have seen the thread because you deleted my account,
preventing me from finding it.

[MrYellow]

grrrrrr Just lost the post, maybe one reason is this board has some problems
with it's usability, mainly too restrictive. It just messed up my post because
it had a link in it...... grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr....... Anyway as I was saying before I
was so rudely interupted by the restrictive settings on this forum......

I think it's just a matter of it being easy to target/support both gay and
straight in the one place then seek out the markets separately. It's not like
this is the only board gay webmasters read.

Anyway, speaking of code coming out, I'm working on an Atom feed format
that will make life easier for both sponsors and affiliates, there is a thread at
GFY with a bunch of info, while a google group is up with links to parsers etc.

google groups "AdultATOM".

-Ben

[MrYellow]

I thought of another possibility. I think I've registered here three times.
I guess you automatically remove members who haven't posted for a while.
It may be that people involved with software, hosting, etc. but not running
a gay site don't have need to post very often. When they do go to post,
they find that they can't log in and they don't bother to re-register in order
to make one post. There have been probably six more threads or so I would
have posted in had my own account been active. Extending the time before
an account is removed may keep more of the support people like designers
and technical people around.

Exactly. That feature is STUPID!!!!

-Ben

[Dzinerbear]

What's the big deal with letting people keep a login? There are bounds that I hardly ever post on and my login is still alive. Like some have said here, if their accounts were alive, they would have posted. So it sounds like a win-win for the board: more members and more posts.

Michael

[Lee]

The reason idle users are removed is because 99.9% of the users being removed by this feature are automated spambot signups and drive-by one off spammers.

The feature does what it is supposed to, weed the community of spammers, when was the last time any of you saw a real spam post on GWW compared to other boards other than in the announcements section?

Its also not something that just 'happens' overnight.

In order for a username to be removed from the database, an email is sent out 30 days after an account has had no activity whatsoever, no login, no posting, etc, telling the person who owns the account all they have to do is login and their account will remain active.

30 days after that, another email goes out, saying the same thing.

30 days after that, some 90 days in total, after a username having no activity whatsoever, the account is flagged as inactive, 7 days later, it is deleted.

If an account hasnt been used, even to just login to the GWW Community, which everyone has to do in order to view threads, the chances are, 99.99% of the time, it was either an account created by a spambot or it was created by a drive-by spammer.

As for not being able to post 'links' in threads, once you hit (a low) amount of posts, you can then start posting links in threads, again, it is another spam prevention tool that works.

I cant remember the last time one of our moderators had to move or delete a spam thread because of this, until this feature and the inactive user features were installed, moderators were removing spam threads on an almost daily basis.

Regards,

Lee

[MrYellow]

I personally have not posted a major announce regarding gay sites here
because when I came to post it my account was gone.

-Ben

[raymor]

Lee, those sound like very reasonable settings for removal.
I checked my trash box to see if I got those and found quite a
few emails from gaywide notifiyingme of replies bck in June, July,
and August, but none of these warnings you're talking about.
So it seems that I AM recieving email from gaywide - your server
isn't mistakenly blocked or anything, but for some reason the notices
to refresh my account aren't being recieved. It might be good to
double check that the system is correctly sending them out.

Hopefully it won't affect me anymore because I realized that the
error with my monitoring script doesn't have to do with the expiration
of unused accounts after all. I just had www.gaywidewebmasters.com
configured instead of forums.gaywidewebmasters.com in one variable.
So now it will log in a couple of times per day and check for any threads
on technical topics where I may be helpful.