I’m pretty disappointed with how this has all played out. I have absolutely no issues with Zeal, but we’re now in a position where a vendor owns the site, which completely goes against the conflict of interest policies we’ve been operating under. I just really don’t understand why the mod team couldn’t be included in this in any capacity, I’m sure we could have found some alternate solutions to weigh in addition...
You've been great to quote today. Read my mind.
Bad situation all around, but I'm glad that Zeal is actually aware of what happens on the site, so I do look forward to seeing things improve.
I agree with all this. I'm very uncomfortable with a vendor owning the site, but it's done now so let's just hope this place doesn't lose it's magic.
While it’s still early stages, I’ve been talking to zeal and if things go well we will be working together to build a new modern purpose built geekhack. This is something I have been interested in doing for a while and started planning a month ago or something like that, so when I saw this thread it seemed like kismet.
It’s still super early. But my goal is to build a platform from scratch with support for modern browsers and Mobile devices. With proper search and such. I want interest checks and keyboards and group buys to be actual functional entities instead of just threads. They will still have comments and such, but I want them to actually have properties like prices and start and end dates and be searchable and filterable. So if you want to see all group buys ending this week, you just search “group buys ending this week”, the search engine supports contextual lookup, and since each GB has an actual end date, your search result would be just that. If you click on TGR, the TGR page could list all the TGR boards. Any TGR buys and ICs. Etc. I also want to support watchlists and smart notifications. If you want a LZ board, set a watch for LZ ICs, GBs and Classifieds, then get notifications (email, sms, possibly apps, etc).
We also discussed content management and our current plan is to continue with community moderation. Neither one of us has much interest in moderating the site ourselves, and it just makes avoiding any impropriety easier and helps make people more comfortable. My current though is we come up with some sort of rules/community bylaws and all agree to follow them. But there will need to be lots of feedback to get to the right destination.
This is only a small part of the complete idea, but I truly think we can make a better and more inclusive community site for everyone. In the short term I will work with zeal on updating and stabilizing the site. I expect it will be at least a few months of work before I’ve got a working platform and I’m ready to start a closed beta, but one of the things I want to commit to is ensuring continuity of all the existing data. I will likely setup an archive version of the old site as well, but my actual intention will be to migrate all legacy content into the new site to take advantage of all the new features like real search.
I also want to say I absolutely understand everyone’s concerns, but I just want to be clear, my goal start to finish is to make a better site for the community to help it grow and make everyone’s lives easier. I also do believe some form of minor monetization is important, because i would very much like to have servers in multiple regions to maximize perf and availability. And i think the site should be self sustaining and not worry about shutting down month to month. But more importantly I would love to find a way to set aside some funds to sponsor events, maybe a full scale keyboard convention, or run events like a prototype contest where people compete to design keyboards and then we buy prototypes for the winners. I’d also love to have money available to help get more buys to moq. Now this is all my personal opinions and zeal might not agree with everything. If I make profit, that is what I plan to use it for. If there is no good way to do it, then I’ll let that part of my dream die.
That said, I am also completely cognizant that I am designing a site for everyone, not just myself. I absolutely want peoples feedback on what they want and don’t want. I think we can find a balance to make the best site for everyone. Please tell me your ideas and concerns. I’d like to do my best to consider and address as many of them as I can.