Regarding the Lula Forum, they said from the outset that the forum would be outside the paywall. That seems to be how it is, so I don't know what happened to Paul R's access. Perhaps just a glitch.
In deciding to keep the forum outside the paywall, I wonder if the Lula duo were mindful of what happened to the old Rob Galbraith forums, which died rather quickly when it was sold and the new owner started charging.
But the Rob Galbraith forums are a good example of the challenges of a site that becomes a victim of its own success. What do you do when the time and costs of maintaining a site become too great, simply because it's so good that it';s too popular? Some survive by advertising, or worse, by selling user tracking information. Clearly the internet would die if everyone started charging, which is clearly not going to happen, but it would be a tragedy if major sites ceased to operate under the burden of success.
I haven't signed up yet. I may. I have read the occasional article. It's a pain that I no longer can. That's life.
Message
Re: [Digital BW] Re: OT - Luminous Landscape
2015-12-15 by Paul Roark
It would be interesting to see the costs of operating a forum. I assume it's just computer time, with almost no labor cost. However, as the backlog of old posts becomes greater, it may be that the cost of maintaining that old stuff escalates. I've generally assumed the cost of computer time and data storage is dropping fast enough so that costs stay reasonable, but maybe not.
(In my old day job I more than once observed that people ultimately become totally unproductive because the follow-up on old matters just keeps snowballing until all people are doing is the follow up on the past. Zero current productivity. In the US government the cost of FOIA requests was one of those costs [and it largely amounted to competitors trying to get the goods on each other]. However, there were surprisingly flexible rules on what needed to be kept. Thus part of my ability to out-survive others was to trash the old files. Forums may need to follow a similar practice.)
Paul
On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 3:38 PM, brian_downunda@... [DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint] <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com> wrote: