There’s nothing that annoys me more than heavy handed moderation of site forums. Terragenesis has increasingly gone from a useful, friendly hobbyist site to one that seems to be run by people paranoid about protecting their presumably minimal ‘revenue stream’.
Here’s a email I received from Andy Slater about a post I’d made regarding my 15mm Palm Tree Tutorial:
I just saw your post about this and deleted it. I don’t feel entirely happy about having done that however my problem is this:
TG was started by Gary James in 1997 and has built up over a period of almost 10 years because of contributions by numerous people. It’s popularity meant that the cost of running it became more than Gary could justify as a hobby expense so he had two options: to shut it down or to find a means of funding it. He chose the latter and that means that in order to continue to survive TG has to protect itself.
Allowing people, be they businesses or private individuals, to post to the effect of “come look at my website/blog/whatever” diverts readers away from TG and, if left unchecked could lead to TG becoming little more than a set of links to other places. Places that will, if they are successful, end up facing the same problems of how to fund themselves that TG has had. Many other sites have faced that problem and disappeared as a result.
If you want to use TG to find an audience for your work then please contribute to our content by posting it on TG rather than trying to divert our readership elsewhere. I anticipate that this was not your intention but now that I’ve pointed out how dangerous it could be to the future of TG, I hope you will forgive me for deleting your post and will chose in future to post your information on TG itself and thus help us to make it even better. 😉
Let’s face it, GoogleAds aren’t going to make you millionaires. In fact my average daily revenue from that sidebar advertising is a massive 13c, regardless of whose readership I ‘divert elsewhere’.
TG want people want people to post their interesting and original content entirely in their site or forum alone, with no link to the originating site or author. Good luck with that policy because it’s only going to do one thing: drive contributors away from TG.
And don’t worry mate, it’ll be the last post I make there.