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Demise Of The Premier .NET community site
Seems like something has horribly gone wrong at ASPFriends.com. The site is being closed as a result of a break down in negotiations with Microsoft over support for funding this developer community forum which has over 73000 members who post over 12 million messages a month regarding MS development. The primary reason for this break down seems to be do with the contract that had to be signed to receive funding. I'm no lawyer and I've not seen the entire contract but it seems like it contains clauses which basically state "at our discretion, with 30 days notice we can terminate this contract and take ownership of your site".
Because I ain't penniless and I control the DNS/Internic records. I will keep the domain names forever and keep the story of the rise and fall there as a warning to others who build MS communities.
They can certainly do it under different domain names, but the Simpson's quote "that reeks of effort" comes to mind. They are being pretty lazy in the forums and while the code and interface are whizbang the human touch and effort is missing. Stealing it means running it and they prefer the forums not email and parallel newsgroups.
By the way I linked to the forums to remind people where MS is emphasizing, delibrately and calculatingly. It is not to be kind to MS it is to be kind to the users that need support in some form. Many of my users don't know there are forums that MS is emphasizing in favor of our support. I will add links to P2P and Developmentor mailing lists to not forget the users that need support. The users are why I started this, and they should not be forgotten. And a "one shot 6 month deal" won't satisfy. I just wanted people to know why I closed, and what MS thinks is better. It would take a lot for me to "put the genie back in the bottle" - they have already shown their true faces in "out competing" a site that is trying to helpthem instead of co-operating with the many support options as I do. MS presented a Draconian contract to the high tech equivalent of a soup kitchen helping their sers and opens a competing soup kitchen and refuses and delays to mention the other soup kitchen to needy coders. I am fine walking away, but I want PEOPLE to know where they need to get help from.
I don't care whether MS pays for it - their customers are affected mostly and it is one less thing for me to do each month :) I was going to close it a while ago for a varity of reasons and MS contacted me and insisted that it should stay and they wanted to support it through June of 2003 no strings attached. Then they chaed their mind.
I am 100% fine with them not supporting it and breaking their promise, and the story ends in December and I am 100% fine with that.
I just made the FAQ to let people know why it closes then. It affects 73,000 people and they deserve a true accounting as to why it closed.
I learned a lot and invented a lot of new moderation tools like Our Moderate Tool and many useful private tools that make mailing list easy to manage. I intend to launch a bunch of very low volume lists using those tool in areas in non-MS ares I love that don't have such a large audience that the server capacity has to be so high and costly.