Personal forums and PayPal payments.

Any of you members with personal forums with automated subscriptions set up for yearly renewals likely got an email notification that the subscription has been cancelled as of today. The reason I did this was because apparently one member could not remember that this sort of payment was set up when they set up their personal forum and filed a complaint with PayPal that I had defrauded him by taking the money from his account without his permission. This is beside the fact that he has had this sort of thing set up for a few years now. So screw this. I don't need these sorts of headaches and hassles from people.

Many people have apparently left here for greener pastures anyway, so I guess this will just hasten the day that this site goes into the red and shutters the doors for good. I sure as hell don't need headaches from anyone here accumulating prior to that day.

And for you who filed that bogus claim, sheesh, you couldn't have come to me directly FIRST so I could take care of it? You HAD to put a black mark on my name with PayPal because you FORGOT? Well, thanks bunches. :angry01:

Rich Z said:

I did this was because apparently one member could not remember that this sort of payment was set up when they set up their personal forum and filed a complaint with PayPal that I had defrauded him by taking the money from his account without his permission. This is beside the fact that he has had this sort of thing set up for a few years now.

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What a POS. People are so dumb when it comes to PayPal. I think a lot of folks don't realize the damage they do when they file claims like this. Or maybe they do, and that makes it that much worse.

If I thought I could handle it I'd offer to help or even buy the site, but honestly I don't know how you've done it this long. Still, there is a wealth of information here, not to mention quite a lot of corn snake history. It would be a shame to see it all go poof.

I got that email this morning and was wondering what was going on, so I came to check my expiration date (thought it was off) and found this post from you Rich.

It's a shame someone would go to the lengths of contacting paypal to complain about a automatic renewal payment set up that they have been on for a couple years already.....instead of contacting you first.

For those of us who still want our personal forum, will we still get a notification of subscription expiration & fees due ???

Thanks, Walter
:crazy02:BOUT' CORNS !!

You should get a notice of expiration before it actually expires. Not sure if it is via email or PM, however, so it might be a good idea to check to make sure your email address is still current in your member record here. You will also notice that the color of your member name will change when the subscription expires, so that should be a pretty strong clue.

I also usually will contact a member when I notice that their forum has expired, unless they have not logged into this site in quite a long time. If that is the case, I just figure they aren't interested at all in participating in this site, and I remove the forum. It's still there, only not visible nor accessible in case someone does decide later on that they want it resurrected. But it doesn't stay in limbo forever.

Sorry, but I went through a bunch of crap over this on FaunaClassifieds, with one person making a real bit stink about how I had defrauded him.

http://www.faunaclassifieds.com/forums/showthread.php?t=500546

So I also made a thread about such abuses in the Feedback forum there, since it seemed that it was needed.

http://www.faunaclassifieds.com/forums/showthread.php?t=492383

I'm still pretty pissed off about this. I mean come on, does anyone REALLY think I'm going to steal money from them at this late date and all I've done to form my good reputation?

Dragonling said:

Still, there is a wealth of information here, not to mention quite a lot of corn snake history. It would be a shame to see it all go poof.

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The deal is that this site HAS to remain in the black. With the retirement of SerpenCo, I cannot afford to dig into my savings in order to keep my websites running. Most of the expenses are being covered by FaunaClassifieds, but still, there is going to be a limit to what I can reasonably do when it comes to financial decisions. And even aside from the financial issue, just seeing participation dry up is quite disheartening, and will obviously play a bit part in any decision that has to be made. It is pretty obvious to me that many people have gone elsewhere, so it is what it is. If no one uses this site and don't care whether it stays or goes away, well, what would you do in my shoes?

And no, I have absolutely NO plans whatsoever of being assimilated by the FaceBorg.

Where else have people gone besides Facebook? The only other corn-dedicated forums I've seen haven't really kept my attention. I find the layout and forum breakdown here to be superior to most. Then again I can get pretty elitist when it comes to things I've grown attached to.

Dragonling said:

Where else have people gone besides Facebook? The only other corn-dedicated forums I've seen haven't really kept my attention. I find the layout and forum breakdown here to be superior to most. Then again I can get pretty elitist when it comes to things I've grown attached to.

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I've just assumed that everyone has been assimilated by FaceBook. Haven't really looked around myself to see if another dedicated cornsnake forum is out there and become more attractive than this one to others.

I'm so sad this happened. It is truly wrong and unfair. I was sad that regular contributors didn't have the auto renew option, but didn't gripe about it and certainly will not ask for that option in light of this.

I deeply appreciate this forum. It is so much better than Facebook in so many ways. For starters, here I only have to click on "new posts" and I see everything, not just what Facebook decides I'm supposed to see (unless I go to each and every cornsnake group I'm a member of individually and scroll and click, scroll and click).

This is my favorite forum anywhere, ever. The community here is very positive and helpful. I'm already a contributor so there's not a lot more for me to do other than to say it has been well worth it and that I plan to re-up when it's renewal time. I understand the economics and I understand that running a forum can be really thankless sometimes.

So it's not much but THANK YOU, Rich.

There's also a lot more absolute nonsense on Facebook. Granted, if you look back through old posts there's plenty around here as well, but I've already gotten sick of the same newbie questions posted 1000000 times because some people just don't have a single clue how to use Google. At least here it's less often, and you can generally just say, "read the stickies."

Does Google even parse Facebook pages via their search engine spiders? I can't recall EVER searching for something and having a hit provided to anything on FaceBook.

With the little experience I have had with FaceBook, it seems great for casual conversations between family, friends, and acquaintances, moment by moment , but as for actually being a repository of information and knowledge that can be searched and researched, I didn't get that impression of usefulness there. But perhaps I am just missing something because of my own lack of experience there. Which, I will be perfectly honest, I will likely never try to improve on. The format there reminds me of the old Usenet days of the internet, and I would like to think forum sites were quite a step up from that time. But obviously I seem to be in the minority in that regard.

It seems to catch some, but most groups are private and so you don't get results. In that way, I find Facebook to be far inferior to forums for exactly the reasons you mentioned. It's great for small time breeders to use of that don't have the time or money to mess with a website, and nice for sharing photos of your animals with other like minded individuals, and even free advertising, but it's not a great place for actual discussion.

Rich Z said:

Does Google even parse Facebook pages via their search engine spiders? I can't recall EVER searching for something and having a hit provided to anything on FaceBook.

With the little experience I have had with FaceBook, it seems great for casual conversations between family, friends, and acquaintances, moment by moment , but as for actually being a repository of information and knowledge that can be searched and researched, I didn't get that impression of usefulness there. But perhaps I am just missing something because of my own lack of experience there. Which, I will be perfectly honest, I will likely never try to improve on. The format there reminds me of the old Usenet days of the internet, and I would like to think forum sites were quite a step up from that time. But obviously I seem to be in the minority in that regard.

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Very much this!
The only thing FB has going for it in discussions or even just sharing pictures, is instant gratification. It is faster moving. Ask a question, you are likely to get at least one answer within 10 minutes or so. I share a picture to say, 5 of the groups I frequent, on average, in 24 hours I will get upwards of 170 "likes" and 3 to 10 comments. Share the same pictures to the 4 forums I use and I'll get 2 to 5 comments on them in the same time frame, all forums combined.

However, the general knowledge in most FB groups tends to be lower than on dedicated forums, in my experience. Searching is nearly impossible, any really great discussions are quickly buried and slip away, never to be seen again, so it's much harder to actually learn anything from a group unless you happened to see the discussion as it happened. Think answering the same, basic, questions on forums like this is tiring? Times that by 100000000 on FB groups and it's easy to see why the general knowledge base is lower, those that know the most are completely worn out from answering those questions, so it's left to those newbies with more energy that may or may not actually know the answer.

FB does work quite decently for a business alternative to an actual website though.

I am an extremely low-tech person. I don't do social media, except for this site. I've had to learn a bit to work this site, but everyone has been at least cordial, and some absolutely friendly, and the help is appreciated. New people need this site; we fall in love with a corn and need all the support your experience can give to do right by the little guys. I'm sure it's hard work to maintain this site; please know you are very appreciated.

I guess all I can promise is that this site will be around as long as it makes sense to keep it. Well, that, or I die suddenly without warning. I don't think Connie could keep all this running.

I keep track of the stats here in various ways, one of which is through my FaunaTopSites listing. You can see the stats of this site here -> http://www.faunatopsites.com/index.php?a=stats&u=12

Take a look at the HIGHEST and then what we are currently getting concerning raw site views.



Highest / Yesterday
Daily - 31,268 / 2,648
Weekly - 189,358 / 17,802
Monthly - 770,365 / 64,639


Looks pretty grim to me. In the heyday of this site, I thought that there was absolutely no reason why this site won't continue to grow and prosper and no reason at all why it wouldn't basically stay around forever. But when I see stats like above, well, obviously I was being overly optimistic.

Many people have apparently lost interest in this site and just found other places to frequent more to their liking, or just lost interest in the topic matter itself and moved on to other interests completely. From my perspective, apparently I have made mistakes running this site if the former is the case, and not much I can do about the latter at all.

Heck, I know I'm not perfect, so nothing I have ever done is perfect neither. In some ways I feel like a bonafide dinosaur. For instance I have restrictions against profanity on all the sites I run. But heck, I watch TV series on Netflix and buy movies that have language that I wouldn't expect to hear anywhere I would tend to frequent. So am I just flat out wrong and out of step with the world of today? I guess with facebook, everyone can have their own pages and say whatever the heck they want without any sanctions about it. Perhaps that is more in line with what people want these days. So that is a big part of the attraction there. So perhaps my mistakes have been to run sites how I would like them to be, and not what the majority of the people really WANT. Oh well. I would like to think I'm not too old to change, but there certainly would be things that I would have a tough time swallowing if I needed to take some of those bitter pills.

Just out of curiosity, I took a look at the posting stats for this site since January, 2010. Here is what that looks like.

I may be prejudiced, but I don't think it is anything you have done or are doing, Rich. IMHO your rules are totally reasonable. This is the best forum I've ever been on, and I started out with BBSs and Compuserve using a 300 baud modem.

I found this site by Googling my corn snake questions. It came up over and over again. There is no doubt in my mind that this site contains the most information and is the best community about corn snakes in English, and I'd bet anywhere in the world.

This site is far superior to Facebook in all the ways that have been mentioned. Again, many, many thanks.

I would guess a fair chunk of the reduction in views is from various groups splintering off. How many corn-dedicated websites existed in 2010 vs. now? Facebook is probably still the main culprit though...groups and personal pages (as opposed to personal profiles) have become significantly more prevalent than they were in previous years, and they're just easier for the average person to deal with. Newer generations are also growing up using Facebook, something I and older generations didn't have until we were in college or later.

Anyway, I checked some of the current personal forum owners and there is one who has not even been back to this site September of 2014. Was it right for me to keep on taking that PayPal payment every year just because it was still set up? Maybe this person still wanted to support the site? Maybe it was just forgotten about? Beats me, but along with me getting slapped with a bogus charge from PayPal by a member here, I just didn't want to leave myself open to another one. It just pisses me off and disappoints me about people all at the same time, I guess.

What do the posting stats for Fauna look like, for the same time period?

Wow- I had no idea it was that bad.

Here are the posting stats for FaunaClassifieds for the same time period.