A quick note to the C&H community

Lorien

Lorien

Nose to the Grindstone
Moderator
Knifemaker / Craftsman / Service Provider
Joined
Dec 5, 2005
Messages
27,886
hi folks,
a short time ago, someone lost their mind and decided to make me the moderator of this forum.

I'm a duty bound type of guy, who has a pretty strong sense of responsibility, so I take my role seriously, (still trying to figure out exactly what my role is!). This is why I've been busting balls, trying to get registered users who post threads about the knives they make for money to part with some of it in order to support a forum that brings them benefit.

Some time ago, before I started raking in wads of cash, (joke) with my design work, my good friend, Ryan Weeks, paid for my Service Provider membership. I hadn't really thought about it before then, but have since paid my membership fees every year. It makes me feel good to know that I'm helping contribute more to this forum than just my time and my mind, (joke).

But, I also want this particular forum to flourish, and I'm the furthest thing you'll find from a cop. This outlook has lead me to the conclusion that trying to get registered users, who are professional cutlers, to upgrade their membership is not something that I want to do. Coming down on people is not something I enjoy at all, and it's also a ton of extra work that doesn't engender good vibes.

So, in order to avoid having a chilling effect on discourse in this forum, I've chosen to restrict my efforts in this regard. This is a learning process for me, so please keep that in mind.

I still hope that knife makers will take advantage of the extra features of this forum by bucking up for a paid membership.

I'm here to serve this forum, so please let me know if I can help you out in any way.

Cheers!
 
Thanks Lorien

I kinda have mixed feelings about the membership thing. I'm all about supporting the community but the fees are incredibly steep for a simple internet forum, and ultimately it's the content providers (those who post comments and photos) that create the value here. Without people actually posting, this place would be useless, and the constant nagging of good folks who just want to share some photos of their work tends to discourage that. We've already lost a lot of good, actively contributing members over the years for precisely that reason, and this forum is worse off for it. Consider also that some of our overseas members come from places where $75 a year is a LOT of money (in some cases, more than an entire week's income).

No one wants this forum to devolve into a spam-haven for crappy makers hawking cheap knives, but we also don't want to chase off or price out the good guys who enrich this forum with their valuable contributions. I, for one, appreciate your efforts in trying to find that balance.
 
Lorien thanks for your work. I've see your dilemma immediately upon taking it on.

In any field there is always attrition of old, and growth of new. I don't attribute the approachable cost of entry as the sole deterrent which drove the quality people away.

It's a grey area: At what point is sharing and 'showing off new' self promotion? (Ummmmmm.... on some basis, all of it?)

Members input = value. Having/maintaining/creating the World's Largest blade forum to include them = value.

Only ONE of them has real $$ costs. The other has costs measured other ways, but paying server bills (?) isn't attached.

NONE of us are able to suggest what is the right entry fee without knowing the costs. This IS a private forum, and only Spark (Kevin S.) can report to us there. However, he's reported to us with a STICKY at the top of this forum about this need.

Spark: This site is kept open through paid memberships. If you are going to advertise items that you've made, please do the right thing and purchase the correct level of membership. You can purchase a membership by clicking here or by going to Settings (top right) and then clicking Paid Subscriptions. Knifemaker's memberships are only $60 a year, and you get to advertise your wares for sale in the Knifemaker's area of the Exchange.
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If some members are free and others pay, there is an inherent imbalance. This has never worked anywhere. (This is getting social/economic, ya! )

So Wulf has posed that $75 is too much. He's NOT wrong. What other solutions do we have?

Good topic.

Coop
 
It's a tough balance keeping a forum going, spam free and profitable. In the past ive worked for, moderated and edited some of the largest forums on the web including one that drew in the 6th most traffic globally at its peak. So i know all too well the difficulties maintaining sites like this, the costs associated and the challenges of keeping it relevant.

This site currently ranks in the top 30k urls globally, top 10k in usa. So while not a heavy hitter by any means it does generate a decent amount of traffic. Hosting a site like this is relatively cheap though. Which advertising revenue alone for a established site like this more than covers the cost of if properly managed. So these memberships are kinda a gravy train to put it bluntly. That's not to say they don't serve a purpose, you definitely don't want spammers flooding the site with pakistani car part damascus bowies, and the paid membership does curtail that. But $75 is pretty steep for services offered. When the web was smaller, and advertising was harder this type of plan made more sense for a forum. But in the days of instagram, facebook, etsy, etc etc sites like this are becoming less, not more relevant.

To me, from my view point, the $75 is just too high for value. Yes its good advertising here, and yes the sale forum is a perk and a good one at that. But.... i don't think there is a maker here who if given a choice of only one would choose this message board over their free facebook or instagram account. And there lies the dilemna facing all paid forums these days. Other advertising and revenue streams are offering more bang for your buck, or no buck at all. At some point paid message boards either have to lower the price of admission, or include more, new and or unique offerings to up the reason to subscribe. Otherwise this site and thousands of others including some i used to work for, will fall victim the same way newspaper classifieds did after craigslist or classmates.com after facebook.

Anyway, thats my 2 cents at least
 
I have benefitted from my paid membership here, no doubt about that. As far as the price, I was a Platinum member long before I turned Orange. My primary reason in the beginning was to be able to enjoy the site WITHOUT the unwelcome banner ads on each and every page. The paid membership assured I wouldn't have to put up with that and it still does. I don't do Face book or Instagram but I do know I have received some work from this site, which I am sure is far greater monetary value than my annual membership cost. Add to all that the real friendships I have gained as a result of being on this site and it is a big win for me.

Paul
 
Aidenag, you lay it out pretty well and at the end of the day we can all see the challenges. This on-line world changes so fast. The amount of non-monetary benefit here is huge yet folks try to boil it down to dollars and cents. I have no answers as I'm too old to have any chance of getting ahead of the curve on any of this stuff. Perhaps the greatest benefit the forum could offer would be solid advice on how to keep up with the curve even though that advice might ultimately damage the Forum by sending members off to the next greatest thing.

What do you think?


Aidenag said:
It's a tough balance keeping a forum going, spam free and profitable. In the past ive worked for, moderated and edited some of the largest forums on the web including one that drew in the 6th most traffic globally at its peak. So i know all too well the difficulties maintaining sites like this, the costs associated and the challenges of keeping it relevant.

This site currently ranks in the top 30k urls globally, top 10k in usa. So while not a heavy hitter by any means it does generate a decent amount of traffic. Hosting a site like this is relatively cheap though. Which advertising revenue alone for a established site like this more than covers the cost of if properly managed. So these memberships are kinda a gravy train to put it bluntly. That's not to say they don't serve a purpose, you definitely don't want spammers flooding the site with pakistani car part damascus bowies, and the paid membership does curtail that. But $75 is pretty steep for services offered. When the web was smaller, and advertising was harder this type of plan made more sense for a forum. But in the days of instagram, facebook, etsy, etc etc sites like this are becoming less, not more relevant.

To me, from my view point, the $75 is just too high for value. Yes its good advertising here, and yes the sale forum is a perk and a good one at that. But.... i don't think there is a maker here who if given a choice of only one would choose this message board over their free facebook or instagram account. And there lies the dilemna facing all paid forums these days. Other advertising and revenue streams are offering more bang for your buck, or no buck at all. At some point paid message boards either have to lower the price of admission, or include more, new and or unique offerings to up the reason to subscribe. Otherwise this site and thousands of others including some i used to work for, will fall victim the same way newspaper classifieds did after craigslist or classmates.com after facebook.

Anyway, thats my 2 cents at least
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I'm really glad this has turned into a conversation :)

I think that the biggest potential for growth and evolution in this forum lies with the global custom knife community. Derrick's comment regarding the power of the greenback and how it relates to those from countries where a USD is worth substantially more than the federal currency is very interesting. I've been thinking about that all day. I love that this forum has become more worldly, and would be happy to see more from our international kin.

First and foremost, this forum- from where I sit- is about education. It's a place where you can nourish your brain with ideas that arrive unannounced. Closely seconded by that, is the knife show social quality, where people become familiar with one another and can connect in an open way, which I don't think can be replicated on any other social networking platform. Forums in general are unique in that respect, from what I can see. Whaddaya think?
 
Could not agree more lorien, its why i lurked here for years and recently started conversing. Have learned a ton, been introduced to talents of so many makers i wouldn't know of otherwise, techniques and tips to try, and ideas that ill be long dead before i could take advantage of it all.

My comment above was more or less specific to the paid membership aspect for makers wanting to show their wares and socialize here without worry of crossing the advertising line in the sand.. I know many makers with zero presence here specifically for that reason who have thousands to 10s of thousands of followers on other platforms. And that to me seems like a missed opportunity for this forum in staying strong and keeping up with the times. How to adjust that without going completely free, reducing cost, or coming up with some other sort of metric is anyones guess. But at some point a shift will be needed i think to keep up with emerging technologies and forms of communication and interaction. Especially as the older generation of makers retire and younger more tech savvy ones become the norm.

Also, Derrick and you're comment about currency and international visitors to this site is FAR more relevant than i think either of you are aware. A quick glance at this sites publicly availible analytics shows that over 25% of ALL traffic is now coming from China. Far surpassing every nation but the USA.
 
Faced with juggernauts the likes of Facebook and Instagram, it may seem that a forum like this one is less "relevant" than in the recent past. Maybe that's true in a raw advertising sense, when it comes to instantly getting sheer numbers of eyeballs on one's work right away. In actual substance though, this forum is worth so much more than the momentary glimpses and one-liner comments of the instant social media networks. I don't think the two are even comparable.

Consider and compare it to libel versus slander. Both are the spread of harmful misinformation, but in the media world libel is considered much worse than slander, because libel is a record like a false newsprint story, while slander exists only for a moment and then is gone, like harmful words uttered over the radio. Libel is worse because has so much more power than slander, due to the fact that it keeps hanging around over time, doing its damage.

In the instant social media scene, things appear then they're quickly gone or forgotten, more like slander. This forum is more like a historical record, lodged into the internet. It's a perpetual, Googleable, searchable body of knowledge, and it has lasting power, like libel. The existence of this powerful body of knowledge is maintained by memberships, but everyone gets to participate in the forum as it evolves along over the years, there for the world to see every time a search for knowledge about cutlery is typed into the internet. Paying for a higher membership means one gets to participate within it at a higher level, which is perfectly fair. You're buying into something real.

Nobody pays to use instant social media networks. What you get out of them (and what they get out of you) is quite narrow (or shallow) in my opinion, and so momentary, compared to a forum like this one. Search for information about heat treatments, or knifemaking, anything, and see if useful information comes up that's been posted to Facebook or Instagram that isn't basically someone's self-posted advertisement, or just a photo of someone's new bladed badassery, but with little content or substance, there and then forgotten. In comparison, relevant information posted to Bladeforums from a decade ago will appear. It's a true historical log, an enormous database of knowledge saturated with endless information about blades, continuously written by the membership itself.

Helping to maintaining its existence and being a part of it is worth so much more than a dollar amount. I think the membership cost is a really smashing good deal.

-Mecha
Spoken from the perspective of a former journalist
 
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Mecha, you have put it beautifully, and I couldn't agree more. The membership level says it all: a member is someone who pays back into the group they're a member of, while is a user is just that, and not a moniker I'd be happy with.
 
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john april said:
it must be a tough job. thank you for taking it on.
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lol...this is a hobby! (then again, none of my hobbies are easy :) )

Sam, that was a brilliant post. I think you just won the thread :thumbup:
 
That was well written Sam!

The value of membership to me has been significant, if only because I value BFC, participate in it, contribute, and frankly benefit from it.

The cost of being a Platinum member from my perspective is quite low.

Best Regards,

STeven Garsson
 
Kohai999 said:
The cost of being a Platinum member from my perspective is quite low.
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The cost of being a Registered User is even lower ;)

Indeed, for some of us, the value we derive from participating in this community far exceeds our $75 annual contribution. Those for whom that isn't the case, well, they go elsewhere...

Good posts, guys
 
Thanks fellas. Of course the content people add into this online record of all things bladed can be of fine quality regardless of membership level, but I think the quality of the entire site itself, in a nuts and bolts (and zip-ties :D) way, is boosted greatly because it's being supported by paid memberships.
 
let those who actually get paid the money ask for the money.

You are not paid and you should not be a tax collector.
 
[video=youtube;g0ahJPxfGp4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0ahJPxfGp4[/video]
 
Half of my customers are from this forum, so it has paid for itself for me in that way.
I know what it takes to run high-volume systems with high uptimes, and don't mind contributing. Especially since I'll run an ad-blocker even if not a member. As a knifemaker who sells here, I consider it an inexpensive investment. Having my stuff *in context* is valuable to me. Though I can understand why some people prefer to sell out of context...
 
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