No one person is so important that their staying or leaving a sight would matter.
I have seen a lot of childish behavior where a member will get his nose bent over some comment someone makes. He will then make a post saying I guess its time for me to go with the hope that people will reply with requests for him to stay. If you want to go then go. If you want to stay then stay.
The rules here can be summed up fairly easily by just saying "don't be an A-hole" If you break the rules you are probably an A-hole and may get kicked off - I personally won't miss you.
Personally I am tired of listening to people whining about staying or going on forums.
Couldn't have said it better me self even if I had put a lot of thought and effort into it.
You have to admit
It is sad to see money change a great website and cause good people to leave.
We are seeing about the same thing at church.
Lotsa people are making lotsa assumptions about what prompted the actions we've taken. That's well and good but in reality ONLY me and Matt KNOW why we have done what we've done. ONLY Matt is feeling the pressure in his personal life. Rest assure MOST of your assumptions are erroneous.
But let's talk money for a moment. It costs me thousands of dollars per year to run this site. It takes many hundreds to thousands of hours of mine and Matt's time annually to run this site. We ask not one red cent from any of you to use it and give you as much lattitude in your comments as we feel we can and still keep it the kinda place it was set up to be. It has never been and never will be a place where all are welcome or wanted. If you can't act like an adult, be civil and follow the rules then quite plainly put I don't want you here and rest assured will not allow you to tarry long. If on the other hand you can act like an adult, can be civil and can follow the rules I think you'll like it here.
Matt and I are no happier than any of you are over the current situation and we'll get it back to a more normal situation as soon as we can. Neither myself or Matt are sure where the pressure we're feeling is coming from. Someone is causing us great greive right now both in regard the site and in Matt's personal life. Yes it's also affected the bottom line of GBO and that's not good for any of us. It takes all of our advertiser's dollars to keep this site running. I long tried to keep it from becoming a business but it seemed to take on a life of its own and became one anyway.
Guys this site gets over 100,000 unique visitors per month. Of the more than one billion websites on the internet this one is in the top 400,000. That fact alone makes it a business whether I like it or not. I'd love to have the personal finances to just pay it from my pocket and not even bother having to have advertisers but can't as I'm sure enough not rich. But then I'd miss some of the good folks who are advertisers here then anyway as I think they add a lot to the site more than just the funds to run it. The bring a lot of expertise in their own areas to it that might not be here otherwise.
If you've not run a business the size of this and managed the expenses of it you have absolutely no clue what you'd do in my situation. Sure I could just shut it down if I wanted to but I really don't want to. We have a lot of good folks to enjoy coming here to read and post and I'm not going to let a few trouble makers who like to run off at the mouth and complain about every little thing spoil that for the rest. We've got ten years of effort, time and money in this site and are not going to do anything to ruin that if it can be avoided.
