Well here are my happy thoughts. Why don't you two sister sites kiss and make up. The Discourse and United Cardists both have things within the boards that I like. If you two get along, this could be a golden age for both of you. I think both of you should concentrate on getting creators on your forums and talk about their cards and help them before they put some wacko cards on Kickstarter or some other crowd funding place.
Words from Mike Ratledge:
What does that mean for you? I hope that it means that everything will settle down here and we can get back to having a good time, I don't really want people just here advertising, but for all intents and purposes, I'm not going to be banning people because of it. Same with people that are primarilly here to sell things in the "Buy/Sell/Trade/ISO" forum, if that's all they want to participate I'm not really good with it, but it will be tolerated unless it is totally abused. I really want people to participate in the forums, just like has been the case for a while, but I'm not going to go hacking people off at the knees for not being like-minded as me.
That being said, I'm going to go review the bans in effect right now on a case-by-case basis. Since I am not aware of some of the history of UC, if there are people I should know about - i.e. people that have been abusive or just a holy pain-in-the-arse in the past, please pass that information along to me by PM. One thing for certain: I WILL NOT TOLERATE PEOPLE HAVING "FLAME WARS" AND CUTTING OTHER USERS DOWN HERE! This is a forum for like-minded people that are magicians, cardists, and collectors to discuss things, and that's why we're here. I'm not the kind of person to go micro-managing what everyone does, but if it gets back to me or I observe that someone is being abusive in any way, I WILL show them the door...
Some things are going to change, the sponsorship will change from the current logo to "Cyberian Way LLC", which is a company that I own for business-related endeavors. I'm going to get us started on my ideas about the "Kick Back" campaign, and create a new "Everything KickStarter related" sub-forum that will have at least the threads I maintain about "Successfully Funded KS Projects" as well as the "Active KS" thread, plus a new one "The Kickstarter Hall of Shame", which we will all have a say in and nominations for that dubious honor will win the project and/or creator a sub-thread of the "Everything KS" subforum of their own for us all to P&M about the projects and the creators of them respectively. We'll have to figure out how to rank them, what's fair as far as tagging someone with the albatross associated with the Hall of Shame, etc. I want it to be something we can be proud of and let other refer to, perhaps it will warant a new website some day when it outgrows the Playing Card arena, but for now, that's all we are concened about. Once that sub-forum is created I might move certain topics to that forum, and I will expect things that are KickStarter related to be posted there as opposed to the "New Deck" forum. I realize that these two topics overlap a great deal, but segregating KS conversations into its own little world will let people that are strictly old deck collectors participate without having to wade through tons of KS-related topics.
All this having been said, I hope that the change is welcomed by all here, and I want everyone to have a good time, feel free to express your opinions and not worry about whether of not I agree. That's not the point here, if we disagree - that's part of the learning process. I'll be the first to admit when I'm wrong, and "It's happened before"! :lol:
Ideas, thoughts, bitch-outs, all welcome here (or by PM if they involve other personalities here, please).
In 2 or 3 weeks - right after we put the New Year behind us, I'm going to be looking for a couple of partners to help me pay for the funding of these forums. It's not that expensive, in fact it's under $450 per year right now, and of course that is subject to change at the whim of GoDaddy.com, but I know that right now expenses are limited to about $430/year for hosting and administration panel fees plus around $10 per year for domain name registration. That's it. Basically I would be looking for two people (or groups of people) to come in at the $110 range or a single person (or group of people) to come in around $220 to basically split the expenses. For now, I've paid up through the renewal date in mid-February for Virtual Private Server hosting, 'cpanel' access for administation and maintenance, and through September 2018 domain registration.
