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.

Originally Posted by Rich Z

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.

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
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/foru...d.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/foru...d.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?

Originally Posted by Dragonling

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Dragonling

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.

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.