Shauk

Sorry, not really trying to oust the man behind the curtain here.

I just got in to it with someone about their forum practices on another site. The forum has about 1200 "active" users, meaning people with over 50 posts in the last year.

maybe 150-200 "regulars" who post several times a day/week.

The thing is, this site has, for a long time, requested donations from it's users.
I understand TFP does this but TFP also has 101k+ registered users and lists 3k+ actives in the board summary, so I think it's well within it's rights to do so, and you don't ask for that much.

That said, TFP also has an active admin/mod community, you guys are actually HERE, and use this site, you're constantly upgrading it with features, blog capability, chat functionality, video embed codes, etc...

The admin over at this other site constantly requests donations, never upgrades or even knows how to use the admin panel, and refuses to let anyone but their "friend" work on the site for them, and he is busy, would do so out of charity, etc...

I've offered to help, was rejected. The admin "claims" to have to pay for dedicated hosting but never reveals how much the costs are (which I think that level of transparency would be important when you're asking for money to maintain something that, in the end, you're really the only individual responsible for it.

Overall I'm super frustrated, because I hate seeing my peers get scammed, but I figure you guys would be able to tell me if I'm overreacting. I don't think I can post anything like that over there without probably getting deleted and banned because people are really getting kind of rebellious lately due to the way the forum is run.

The moderators have no rules, they act as they see fit, at the expense of others sometimes. The admin took 5 years to update VB to a new version, stuck us with one skin, broke the calendar of events (this was like 6 months ago) and nothing has changed.

Admin finally made a poll asking if we wanted to leave reputation anonymous or not. People said no at like a 70/30 split, admin didn't like the outcome, chose to ignore us and tell everyone it was staying the same because they disagreed with the outcome.


I dunno what to do, Kinda messed up because it's where you're truly powerless to do anything. Can't appoint a new admin, can't get the broken things fixed, admin ignores votes that they put up if they don't match the outcome they wanted, giving the illusion of a democracy, yet takes the money of it's users anyway.

Is that really legal?

Just fed up and don't know how to stop the scamming. :\