Okay, this is either funny, weird, or both. I can't seem to post here under my admin account, even though it's not a moderated thread. Perhaps it was moderated previously, I was excluded, then it was changed to unmoderated but the exclusions being removed isn't part of that process?
But why shouldn't the names and email addresses of RB staff be public knowledge? This is a major issue over there: they hide behind aliases, and apparently want as little contact with their members as possible.
If they don't want those addresses posted and tell me so, they won't be posted. Especially in a situation where someone's inbox is being flooded as a result.
I don't agree with their decision to keep themselves at distance from the public and a few things this administrator (if that's his role) said led me to think he's very new to the role and hasn't quite gotten the part down yet about figuring out the intentions of the combatants and that might doesn't make right.
I think they're shooting themselves in both feet. Actually, they've been doing so for a long time. But now they have Uzi's. I feel no compulsion to hide the ammo from them. iHub's traffic, which was already higher than SI's, is growing tremendously right now and it's because of the migration of various large groups of people that RB has pissed off one way or another.
Personally, I'm really confused by that site of late. First, RagingAaron (who I had a lot of respect for and would consider hiring to replace me here if I ever heard from him) disappeared, then he re-appeared with a new message of hope and things started getting fixed on the site, then he was gone again without a trace and replaced by people who not only seem ill-suited/prepared for the role, but also prefer to remain hidden.
I suspect that the admin role on the site has fallen to basically what were customer support people at the parent company, who simply wouldn't be equipped to do the job. The average CS person would simply figure that if someone's complained about a lot, then they're guilty. An experienced admin knows to really check to see if that's the case because experience has taught him that the opposite is true more often than not.
As you might have read here and there, I was putting a lot of effort into trying to find a contact at Lycos to negotiate the purchase of RB. This was several months ago. Nobody ever contacted me. I'm trying again now, but doubt the outcome will be any different. And as their traffic levels continue to shrink because they're chasing people over to SI and iHub, the price I'd be willing to pay for that site is decreasing pretty rapidly.
If we owned RB, I think I would either leave it admin-free as it's essentially been for a long time (the Yahoo model), or completely shut off posting access and just archive the messages for search purposes.
From a business perspective, all they have going for them is ad revenues and though rates are improving, the bottom line can't be doing well with so many users leaving. iHub is gaining approximately 100 new users per day lately, almost all of which are people leaving RB. That snowball is in motion and all it can do is grow. RB is powerless to stop it.
So we can either buy them for an amount that would decrease by the day or just bide our time and wait for the inevitable: our owning all of their marketshare without spending a dime to get it. The downside of that (and a big reason why we bought SI) is that I don't want to see the lights turned off and all that posting history lost. |
