Audii-Dudii

according to its recent Form 10-K filing, Internet Brands earns more than a third of its revenue from licensing vBulletin to other sites. To switch this one back to Kawf would be a tacit admission that vBulletin has its shortcomings and in the long run, this could potentially cost them more in licensing revenue on the vBulletin side of the company than they stand to lose in ad revenue generated by Audiworld if they ultimately shut down the site.

In short, and while I certainly hope that I'm wrong, I can't imagine IB will ever consider switching Audiworld back to Kawf under any circumstances.

Kris Hansen

Agreed. Isn't the HUGE picture poster enough? :P

ScratchRob13

I far from assume Kris is a IB lap dog, From what I understood he could basically sit back and say "I told you so" and instead is still trying to fix the problem, which I commend.

On a separate thought, I think the damage may already be done, for having the first exodus to another site, it will be hard to get a lot of them back to AW.

- GT Style -

I comend your dedication to the site & trying to fix it...

Maybe IB will realize they screwed up, cut their losses & sell it off to someone who knows how to make it work (ie; Kawf, listen to users, etc..)

s4wood

The damage is already done...quattro world has the vast majority of users that moved over there now....the ACTIVE people. I dont think any amount of damage control can be done. What ever value there was in AW when IB bought them...is probably less than 10% of what the purchase price was. You dont have visitors..you dont have vendors...you dont have income. PERIOD.

Audii-Dudii

From a business perspective, it actually makes a lot of sense, but there's a price to be paid, as we've witnessed.

They tried, but it didn't work. In view of IB's business strategy, they need to standardize everything as much as possible so as to minimize cost and maximize profit -- think of them as the Clear Channel of web sites, where all the operations are centralized in one place -- and allowing Audiworld to go its own way is likely too much of a headache to be worth the small amount of revenue it generates.

|everso!|

kris,

i gotta feel sympathy for you, jet, and the other people who started this island from the beginning....you guys did a good job for many years on it....and that should be commended.

i will also contribute, however, that even if audiworld went back to a kawf system RIGHT NOW, i'm quite sure that many of the 'departed' will not be coming back. the damage has been done, and IB have shown basically NO CONCERN about the users of AW and/or what WE need or like....it's NOT a forum run by enthusiasts for enthusiasts anymore...it's a forum run by a company for enthusiasts. That's not the same thing at all, and the users can feel that now.

We all know that IB is doing all this, not you guys.....and you have our sympathies in every way. good luck with it, man!

Audii-Dudii

It's interesting to note that Roger Penske, one of IB's directors, recently sold nearly all of his holdings in the company. He's a pretty astute businessman, so I wonder what this says about his view of the company's future?

TS4F

Kris,

Is this "JE built piece" the threaded look that we saw previews of last year? If so, is the issue with it the speed at which it works (what we were originally told) or the fact that they don't want it on their other sites (which would be the "global update" thing I'm reading here)??

If the problem is database speed (hard to imagine) then that's a tough one. But if it's just the fact that they want all their forums to run the same build of software, that is much more feasible. Right now we have an option of the threaded view once we're in a thread -- people can choose to implement that or not. If the database is fast enough to show a threaded view at the forum level (which it certainly should be) it could be made an option just like the threaded view within a thread. People on other sites and new users to AW could use the default view, and old users here could enable the threaded forum view.

It's nice to hear you say that they know they fvcked up. There are two things they can do to fix it: (1) Apologize - sincerely - to the community, and (2) enable the thread view at the forum level. The thread view is the ONLY reason the other site exists. If they had given us an *option* to turn on the threaded view, everyone would have enable it and they'd all still be here. Having that option available on all their sites would hurt nothing, even if it was only actually used on this one.

Thanks for being the intermediary between us and IB. However, it would be really nice of some of them would show up for the conversation. Any chance of getting some of them in here? Their silence makes it seem like they don't care.

4Driver4

That's only half right. The "option" to run threaded creates issue. Threaded view must be required for the threaded view to work correctly.

If I run threaded and you don't, you can see where your response will land on the threaded view. So you see nothing wrong while the threaded view is a mess.