do you know someone that could take it over? i know i would throw in some money to have access to that info again. just a thought, dont know if or how it could work.
Rusty, I know someone who could run it. Me.
I have some insight on all of this I should share: Right when Gerald posted that he was looking for someone to take over 650rider, I sent him an email asking him if he was selling it, or just looking for someone that was willing and capable to take it over. I was about 90% sure he was looking to sell it and I was right. Before I told him who I ran XS650.com, we emailed back and forth a few times regarding the site and how much traffic it was receiving and where it was hosted and things like that. He told me he needed it off his old company's servers in the next couple of weeks so the new owner would need to transfer the domain and site to a new company and reinstall the forum software and reconfigure it all and reinstall the database. That would get the site up and running again. This could be all be done in less than 24 hours but would be a lot of work for someone unfamiliar with that forum software and database configuration. So he didn't want to set a price and was asking for offers. In the end, after I told him who I was, I ended up offering him a few hundred dollars and he responded that he was looking for closer to $2,000.
..
I was only interested in the site because there is a lot of valuable information there and I'm capable of running it. It would be a real shame to lose everything that is there and I thought maybe I could either buy it and keep it going as like a sister site to this one, or merge them, or use it as an archive or something. I really didn't know what I would do with it but thought it shouldn't be just shut down and lost. But I knew it wouldn't be because Gerald said how he's been in the internet business for over ten years and he knows the site is valuable because of the traffic. So that means someone who could give a shit less about the XS650 could buy it and load it up with ads and make some money off it. Actually if someone did buy it for that kind of money, even if it was a member just to keep it going, they would have to completely load it up with ads just to hope to make their money back within a few years. And with that many ads, everyone would get pissed off and leave and the whole thing would probably be a flop.
So when the site was shut down, I assumed Gerald was in the process of transferring everything over to a new host and it would be back up soon. Turns out it was shut down unexpectedly and now he just wants to sell it as-is and have the new owner get it back up and running again. The problem is, not many people know how to run even a simple website and if they do, they probably don't want to have to learn the new forum software and also have to pay a lot of money to do it! So to me, it seemed like he was holding the data of site hostage for $2,000.
Now that the site has been down for a couple of weeks, the search engine rankings will be seriously affected and the traffic of the site will go way down so it's not as valuable to an outsider. The only person who sees any value a site that's not even working is someone who has lost something because of it going down (all of you former members) because of all the time and energy invested in creating tech articles and the information that was shared when helping each other out. That's probably why he's now said he "wants a few hundred for it".
So where does this all go from here? I don't know.. I think everyone who has transferred here from there can see xs650.com has a better set-up and the only reason everyone misses that site is because of history and information that was seemly lost. If all that good information was here, no one would miss the old site.
Well maybe a couple of you. And there is a lot of shit on that site not worth the server resources to save or bring back.
Now I said above, I am capable of running the site, but I am unfamiliar with the software so there would be a learning curve. Also the fact that the reason I started this site is because I like vBulletin and didn't like what the other XS650 forums were using. I thought I could make a better XS650 site than any of the others so I set out to do it! So I wouldn't want to admin 650rider using the software that is currently used because it's not supported like vBulletin is (because vBulletin is not free). Now there is probably a way to import (convert) that database to work with this one, but it would be a huge job. If I ended up buying the site, I think it would be best to just bring over some of the tech stuff and archive the rest. If you all were to get togther and buy it, you could probably save the whole thing, including the shitty look and setup.
Alright, well that's about everything that I know about the whole situation (including my bias commentary on the whole thing). If enough people or members are interested in paying Gerald's ransom (whatever the current amount is), it could be saved for the most part. Even if it was just to buy the whole thing for the database.
So now that I've come clean on that whole thing, what does everything think about all of the above?