So whats this all about...?

Vexorg

This is a commercial forum for airsoft retailers and airsoft sites and associated commercial interests.

This is a paid service, so only paid up members can start threads.

Each paid up member can have one active thread and can close an old thread and open a new one to keep things up to date and easy to follow.

There is a private forum for these members to agree on etiquette and how best to serve the community and provide a commercial service at the same time and if we need to make changes to how the forum operates, these members will have a certain amount of say about the forum operation, the intention is that it will be run similar to the other commercial interaction forums (almost no moderation) and it will be possible to upgrade from one live thread to a full forum if required.

The service is set up as a monthly recurring, is paid from paypal and can be cancelled at any time via your paypal account, part months will be charged as a full month.

More stuff to be added as required, please check regularly and check for updates.

Cuddlesworth

Are we allowed know who the paid members are? Are they allowed post outside the forum to answer questions about their business or products?

Spitfire666

i'd imagine all the details will be revealed once its up and running.
it would appear that this will be the place for them to make anouncements and answer product related quieries to keep it off the main board and not have to worry about advertising.

kdouglas

The primary reason for this forum is that the commercial threads (i.e. sites and retailers) in the main forum are actually against normal boards.ie policy.

In the early days of this forum when airsoft was only starting out, the first retailers and sites were allowed have a thread as it helped the community overall. Now it has gotten to a point where there are many more retailers and sites in the main forum and so those commercial interests will now be required to pay a subscription to have a thread here.

Commercial threads will be removed from the main forum and moved to here. Aside from this forum, anyone associated with a site or retailer is a normal poster in any other forum, and as such they may not advertise their business outside of this forum.

(This is the case at the moment anyway, retailers are not allowed post about their business outside of their own thread)

Cuddlesworth

So essentially the same operation as now but simply with the retailer threads being here(assuming they pay) and only one active thread at once. So sites would have to forgo the tradition of a normal site thread in conjunction with a special event thread since only one thread could be active?

Rew

For now anyway. Its going to evolve. Its been made clear to all the comercial people that this would happen eventaully. The fee is very small and just formalises things a bit which is in everyones interest.

Cuddlesworth

Would it not make more sense to simply create sub forums for the sites retailers themselves within this forum? Let them mod the individual forums with the airsoft mods as control for abuse. Individual threads could be created to talk about certain topics or points of interest to do with the site or retailer and would be more manageable from their standpoint and from a site users standpoint apart from finding the damm thing. Actually they would hold credence to the arguement that Airsoft and paintball could be separated within the sports category as the sub forums are starting to reach ridicules levels.

RC car fanatic

Does that mean I cant post in it?

kdouglas

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Would it not make more sense to simply create sub forums for the sites retailers themselves within this forum? Let them mod the individual forums with the airsoft mods as control for abuse. Individual threads could be created to talk about certain topics or points of interest to do with the site or retailer and would be more manageable from their standpoint and from a site users standpoint apart from finding the damm thing. Actually they would hold credence to the arguement that Airsoft and paintball could be separated within the sports category as the sub forums are starting to reach ridicules levels.

Having too many sub-fora tends to make the forum messy and people are less likely to actually check each of the individual sub-fora for each retailer and site as often. For now it's best to just leave sites/retailers in one forum and give them threads in it.

RC car fanatic wrote: »

Does that mean I cant post in it?

Anyone can post in the forum and the threads, but only retailers and mods will be able to create new threads.

RC car fanatic

Anyone can post in the forum and the threads, but only retailers and mods will be able to create new threads.


Oh cool.

Cuddlesworth

kdouglas wrote: »

Having too many sub-fora tends to make the forum messy and people are less likely to actually check each of the individual sub-fora for each retailer and site as often. For now it's best to just leave sites/retailers in one forum and give them threads in it.

There have been subforums created for pretty much every topic of conversation to the bereavement of the actual Airsoft forum. I don't know if you have noticed but if you remove the retailer/sites and newbies threads you are left with little or nothing to post within the main forum any more that would not be better suited for a subforum. I think the point where you make the argument that there are too many subforums went a long time ago.

That and if I was a retailer and paying(even a nominal fee) I would expect more then a single thread within a forum dominated by threads with well over a few thousand replies. Separate threads would allow both users and retailers to better filter posts and replies and provide a better service.

Rew

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

There have been subforums created for pretty much every topic of conversation to the bereavement of the actual Airsoft forum. I don't know if you have noticed but if you remove the retailer/sites and newbies threads you are left with little or nothing to post within the main forum any more that would not be better suited for a subforum. I think the point where you make the argument that there are too many subforums went a long time ago.

It will evolve as I said. Sub-forum for every commercial poster is a terrible idea, they don't have that much to say and have done fine with one or 2 threads so far. You see it all over boards where sub forum after sub forum have been created and it gets over diluted. Newbie forum is testing the water we will see how it goes sub forums are as easily removed as created.

The comercial posters do very well out of boards.ie IMHO and are going to get a say in the running of the commercial forum.

Mrs MaxForce

Rew wrote: »

For now anyway. Its going to evolve. Its been made clear to all the comercial people that this would happen eventaully. The fee is very small and just formalises things a bit which is in everyones interest.

to whom ever moderates this thread we have not been approached or pmed about this :mad:.it has never been said to us at any stage would it not have been a common courtesy to pm everyone involved ie. retailers and site owners before this was posted are we not the one that have stuck or necks out for the better of the sport

FingalAirsoft

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

There have been subforums created for pretty much every topic of conversation to the bereavement of the actual Airsoft forum. I don't know if you have noticed but if you remove the retailer/sites and newbies threads you are left with little or nothing to post within the main forum any more that would not be better suited for a subforum. I think the point where you make the argument that there are too many subforums went a long time ago.

That and if I was a retailer and paying(even a nominal fee) I would expect more then a single thread within a forum dominated by threads with well over a few thousand replies. Separate threads would allow both users and retailers to better filter posts and replies and provide a better service.

I totally agree with the above, and nobody pm'd me or any other site owner I have spoken to .

As Mrs MaxForce stated it is us who have stuck our necks out to provide sites to skirmish and invest back into the sites for a better experience for you the skirmisher;).
Maybe it's time for all the site owners and retailers to meet and discuss
this;) as some are start up business's and some are established!!!!


:mad::mad::mad::mad:

Bren

Cuddlesworth

Rew wrote: »

It will evolve as I said. Sub-forum for every commercial poster is a terrible idea, they don't have that much to say and have done fine with one or 2 threads so far.

Really, I don't know about any other users of the airsoft forum but in a thread with well over a thousand posts I can't help be notice the same questions being asked and posts being lost in the quagmire. TBH I can't stand any of the retailer threads any more as they require too much time to filter out the crap in the myriad of posts.If you were to take Shiva's thread, and separate it into separate threads similar to any other commercial interaction forum on boards are you telling me you would not have the equivalent of close to 1,000 threads?

In a retailer forum it should not matter how busy it is, it should matter what level of service is too be expected from it. From a service standpoint I think separate fora would be better suited for the members of airsoft. It would provide retailers to answer questions with a more personal and direct touch, let them keep a better track on requests and query's and would allow users to quickly filter out recent threads and stop the same questions repeating themselves.

Rew wrote: »

You see it all over boards where sub forum after sub forum have been created and it gets over diluted. Newbie forum is testing the water we will see how it goes sub forums are as easily removed as created.

As I said before, with the inclusion of the newbies and retailer forums to the two exisiting subforums you have far removed the ability to post much that would not be better suited to a sub-forum. All you have to do now is create a Airsoft Whiner's and Airsoft News subforum and remove the original Airsoft forum.

Rew wrote: »

The comercial posters do very well out of boards.ie IMHO and are going to get a say in the running of the commercial forum.

I'm well aware that outside of the airsoft forum any one of these commercial threads would be a insta ban if unpaid for and they should be thankful for that. But if you are going to put the airsoft forum more into line with the rest of boards then does it not make sense to at least provide them the same curtseys as the other commercial threads.

kdouglas

Cuddlesworth; The commercial interaction forums are, as far as i know, charged at a much higher rate than the small fee the retailers and sites here will be asked to contribute to the forum. Either way, it is all experimental, at the moment the mods and admins feel that a sub-forum for each and every retailer would get too messy, however if those retailers wish to request a seperate subforum then they can, i'm not sure why you seem to be so personally offended by this? In one sentence you're giving out about having too many sub-fora and then in another you want to give each retailer a seperate sub-fora?

This is not up for discussion, the forum has been created, consider it a beta or trial run, if it becomes evident along the line that it needs to be done differently, it will, but for now it's gonna be run the way Vexorg outlined above.

Mrs.Maxforce/FingalAirsoft: As far as I am aware, every retailer and site was told when they were given a thread that it is strictly against boards.ie's rules for commercial interests to post on the site as anything other than a normal user, however in the early days we made an exception to help the community. It has now gotten to a point where the owners of the site feel those commercial interests are established enough that they can afford to give something back to boards.ie. My apologies if you were unaware of this, however rest assured they are not asking for an extortionate amount, merely a small subscription. You will be given more details when it has been fully finalised.

Shiva

Just a very quick note with a couple of points that occur to me about this new setup. Bear with me on this, as its not a criticism of Evelyn, Bren, Cuddlesworth, Rew or any of the Boards mods and admins, by any stretch of the imagination - they all have valid points.

1 - I don't have a problem throwing a few shekels at Boards.ie for the privilege of promoting Eirsoft and servicing customers. In fact I welcome it - I've always been nervous about promoting Eirsoft on Boards.ie precisely because of the "no commercial pimping" rule which is strictly enforced on all the other fora - Most of the mods will verify this, as I've always checked with them before starting any new threads which could even remotely look like I'm promoting myself or my company. I paid a years subscription awhile ago with this in mind, in an effort to show a small token of appreciation for the tolerance shown by the admins and mods. I also have some very strong opinions on some of the shenanigans that have happened here over the past few months, but tried to keep my head down because of the allowances made for me. If I'm paying for a service to advertise Eirsoft, it gives me a little more "legitimacy", and I wont be so shy in expressing those opinions

2 - Cuddlesworth makes a very valid point about being restricted to only one thread - I find it very hard to cope with the Eirsoft thread, and splitting it up into various threads in a sub-forum would make it a lot easier to manage. However, this is all very new and untested, so nobody knows how it will evolve over the coming weeks, so I'm prepared to shut up and go along with whatever the admins have in mind. If I don't like it, I can opt out or offer constructive suggestions to improve the experience for both myself and my customers. I'm not going to b***h about it, because I've reaped the benefits of being able to communicate with customers this way for a year now, and I'm happy to see what happens next.

3 - If I was an admin reading some of the posts above, I'd shrug my shoulders and say "F**k ya then - no commercial interaction at all - all retailer and site threads locked". As I said, not a criticism of anyone - we all have valid opinions and are entitled to post them, but I think we should reign in a little and see what happens. Lets wait until we're notified of costs and rules before getting uppity. Boards.ie don't owe us anything at all - its we who owe them. Lets not ruin it for all the retailers and sites with a few hasty words

Rew

The Airsoft forum is geting special treatment and the comercial interaction is being kept here as opposed to being sent off to a forum with electronics components suppliers and hosting providers. Vexorg decided on the initial setup of this forum and has created a private forum for all the retailers to get together and discuss what they want to do how they want this to work. The process of getting all of the relevent people added to that forum has begun.

Now we could do exactly what Cuddlesworth says and organise to have all the airsoft retailers shipped out to a separete forum and charge them the same as what is being paid there (alot more I belive) but the retailers can decide that for them selfs.

Cuddleswoth, your opinion on what should be done with newbies etc is noted. There are others that don't agree and for now this is what we will be doing. There have been a couple of threads about it. If it doesnt work out then we will go back, the world is not ending, satan is not walking the earth and things can go back to the way they were if it doesn't work out!

Now I was under the impression that the commercial users knew that they existed here even though they shouldn't by normal boards rules. We have asked the admins to clarify this situation over the last few months as the number of commercial people grew beyond all expectations. I aslo thought that all the commercial users knew we were looking for that clarifaction, obviously not.

Now im going to lock this thread untill all the retailers can be added and contacted to explain everything fully.

Edit: Well said Shiva