What's in between the lines..call it a bluff

I'm on holiday, so getting a bit bored and I'm nit picking. So lets take a look at a recent posting and "anal-yse" it.

Romeo, you seem to think that all forums exist for the likes of you to post your products and services. Think about it. This forum (and many otherslike it) are started and run by volunteers. The costs associated with keeping a forum like ours alive run up to several thousand dollars a year, and have to come from somewhere. Advertisers, sponsors, and if that weren't enough, out of our own pockets. Did you think that there would be no terms and consitions attached to your membership and right to freely post your advertisements? Prove me wrong by posting a list of forums that allow a free-for-all, yet have the community like ours.

This posting of course is not found here, the first one I like is in red color. What's the actual cost of running a forum on the internet? First of all how much are we paying to run this forum? Zero cents so far, off course there are string attached, we are not paying a single cents and this forum is not ours to call it so the host have every right to put up "advertisements" where they deem fit. We come back to the being a private forum and etc, to put a cost at "thousand dollars" is a load of crap unless you pay someone as a staffer. If you read the second sentence, it says that it was started and run by volunteers, so are they now no longer run by volunteers?

What does it take to run a forum? My answer, if your forum is not too fanciful you don't even need a professional to run it since there is no animation nor special effects of the forum. No software fees, since they are using phpBB which comes free they only cost incurred would be your domain name, since it;s an .sg that amount to less then $30 a year for the registration. Hosting locally is far more expensive that overseas, e.g. in US for hostig facilities with unlimited storage and bandwidth, that goes less than USD 200 per year. Maybe you pay a liitle more for hosting in Singapore but my guess is not by much. So the most I factor in is less than $400 per year to run the forum. So where does the " thousand dollars" come in to play? Most probably if they say it that they need to get designer and professional to do up the site, then they are wasting money on this people because I'm not impress at all with what I see. I've seen better site then this!

On the second point, where is the free-for-all exercise? Don't see that happening, this poor guy cut and paste something and he got torn down like a poor rabbit with all the wolves joining in the fun and kicking and tearing him apart, then the thread get locked up!

If you ask me, it's a load of shit. It may start off with as spirit of volunteerism and sharing of information from the original founder of the forum, however it has turn out to be a money making machine that the existing owner(s) could not simply overlooked. I don't blame them if they want to make some profit, but hallo don't go and bullshit in the open forum and says this things cost and why must have strict set of rules, any secondary school geek can give you a running cost of setting up a forum.

In conclusion, the internet is heresay, it represent millions of people but you don't have to take the full bullshit in the face while smiling. There's ton of craps out there, but you don't take everyone of them at face value. As for me, I visited the site to pass time or when I'm bored, lately I got kind of sick when somebody ask where is the place to get your car fix and the answer comes automatically to a certain "advertiser". Here you go, you don't allow people to advertise for free, if you pay no worries, everyone will start posting and point to your direction for free! That's it for me, too many hypocrites (hope I get that spell correctly, because this forum don't have any censors and you post and it comes up that way, shit for shit and no brown mountain will appear ) there and I will try and find other things to keep me occupied in passing time rather then visiting a forum that's run by commercialism.