Chile Forum

This forum gets used in two ways, firstly as a source of facts about Chile, where the actual information supplied is generally quite decent, sometimes uniquely so, thanks mainly to the Moderators I would guess. You may get multiple answers, all different, to your query but that is the nature of the beast..

However It also gets used as a general discussion board, and a lot of the topics have nothing to do with Chile; and aren't of a factual nature; that is they consist mainly of the posters' opinions (and you probably know how that saying goes)....

But hopefully we are all big boys and girls with calibrated BS filters, so who cares what is said in that second category. Most posters to me appear reasonably genuine, especially as all the real trolls seem to have been weeded out. AFAIC this is a non-topic.

dear admin
the stuff i have read on your site is good...
i thank you for keeping this forum alive as it does clear up some things...
who cares if you make money from it? to live you need money everyone needs money... so i ask again who cares if he makes money...
i have been very happy with the kind of balance shown in this forum
the beautiful thing about this forum is that YES there are some nutters(you know who you are) out there posting but hey thats only my opinion and the forum respects my opinion...
it is one of the few forums out there that allows for fierce debate without juvenile punishments handed out.... i rarely use the site but its kind of grown on me.... and you can have a nice conversations with some really interesting people....
now off to the real world....where did i put my horse?
remember to laugh more, live passionatly and embrace life....

admin wrote:Add the hundreds of hours to operate and maintain, costs of servers, domains, backup systems, and so on. If I was hiring people to operate this forum, rather than doing it myself, we would easily break through the $30,000 US a year operating costs between technical costs and paying someone to handle the day to day administration (that is, if I went cheap and outsourced to India perhaps). As it is, I do all this stuff myself, because not sure I would trust anyone else to do it. At least not without spending a lot more than $30,000 a year on labor costs.

If you value your labor costs and costs to run the server at $30,000 a year then you certainly overvalue yourself. I ran a board as large and as active as this one a few years back and I know how much labor is required. You are stretching it to say the least...unless of course you value your labor at about $100 an hour and count your posting time. You could handle everything outsourced to India or the Philippines for less than $5000 a month and that would be stretching it.

Not disputing the fact that there is a lot of labor involved and that some technical skills are needed, but it's not $30,000 worth by any stretch of the imagination.

OMG how funny would that be....to have an English language ex-pat web forum in Chile out sourced to India???? It makes me head spin, and it makes me laugh.....

Ripsigg wrote:

admin wrote:Add the hundreds of hours to operate and maintain, costs of servers, domains, backup systems, and so on. If I was hiring people to operate this forum, rather than doing it myself, we would easily break through the $30,000 US a year operating costs between technical costs and paying someone to handle the day to day administration (that is, if I went cheap and outsourced to India perhaps). As it is, I do all this stuff myself, because not sure I would trust anyone else to do it. At least not without spending a lot more than $30,000 a year on labor costs.

If you value your labor costs and costs to run the server at $30,000 a year then you certainly overvalue yourself. I ran a board as large and as active as this one a few years back and I know how much labor is required. You are stretching it to say the least...unless of course you value your labor at about $100 an hour and count your posting time. You could handle everything outsourced to India or the Philippines for less than $5000 a month and that would be stretching it.

Not disputing the fact that there is a lot of labor involved and that some technical skills are needed, but it's not $30,000 worth by any stretch of the imagination.

ahhh, actually, I do bill at more than $100 an hour (most of the time), but that is neither here nor there. Yea, the cost of running web sites has come down lot since I started years ago.

Sure, I could hire some kid in India that has no idea where Chile is located or anything about it to post all day long, but do you really think the dynamic would be the same? It would likely be better if I just automated the replies by script.

New member: Hi, just found this forum.

Automated PX: So why Chile?

Automated Me: Just ignore PX, he is having a bad Chile day.

For the really paranoid and looking for a good forum conspiracy theory, how about this? The whole forum might be automated. If you are reading this, you might be the only sucker out of 2,000+ members that is a real person.

There are actually people that have tried to start forums about Chile with a raft of fake users like that.

Seriously though, I have kicked around the idea of hiring some backpacker for grunt IT labor, but what is the fun in that? Besides, would it really land me more clients? Likely not. Same reason I still answer the English only line or new client email, rather than let a secretary do it or try to automate it. The answers need to be real.

Personally, I've learnt a lot from this forum, free of charge, por gracia .
As have most all here (I might add) any yet some feel the need to bitch?

admin wrote:

Ripsigg wrote:

admin wrote:Add the hundreds of hours to operate and maintain, costs of servers, domains, backup systems, and so on. If I was hiring people to operate this forum, rather than doing it myself, we would easily break through the $30,000 US a year operating costs between technical costs and paying someone to handle the day to day administration (that is, if I went cheap and outsourced to India perhaps). As it is, I do all this stuff myself, because not sure I would trust anyone else to do it. At least not without spending a lot more than $30,000 a year on labor costs.

If you value your labor costs and costs to run the server at $30,000 a year then you certainly overvalue yourself. I ran a board as large and as active as this one a few years back and I know how much labor is required. You are stretching it to say the least...unless of course you value your labor at about $100 an hour and count your posting time. You could handle everything outsourced to India or the Philippines for less than $5000 a month and that would be stretching it.

Not disputing the fact that there is a lot of labor involved and that some technical skills are needed, but it's not $30,000 worth by any stretch of the imagination.

ahhh, actually, I do bill at more than $100 an hour (most of the time), but that is neither here nor there. Yea, the cost of running web sites has come down lot since I started years ago.

Sure, I could hire some kid in India that has no idea where Chile is located or anything about it to post all day long, but do you really think the dynamic would be the same? It would likely be better if I just automated the replies by script.

New member: Hi, just found this forum.

Automated PX: So why Chile?

Automated Me: Just ignore PX, he is having a bad Chile day.

For the really paranoid and looking for a good forum conspiracy theory, how about this? The whole forum might be automated. If you are reading this, you might be the only sucker out of 2,000+ members that is a real person.

There are actually people that have tried to start forums about Chile with a raft of fake users like that.

Seriously though, I have kicked around the idea of hiring some backpacker for grunt IT labor, but what is the fun in that? Besides, would it really land me more clients? Likely not. Same reason I still answer the English only line or new client email, rather than let a secretary do it or try to automate it. The answers need to be real.

No doubt you can bill at any rate you choose to, but the actual value of the time is something else. The technical skill level is quite low and short of your posting, There are many high school students that could do the technical things needed to run a server and run a forum these days. Of course, there is fun in doing the things yourself and keeping your skills tuned up. When I was running the forum, I took the technical side of things as an opportunity to hone my skills and keep them in use. The value of that training and continual education was payment for running the teaching forum.

Your postings? That's another story. Without the forum and your related sites, you wouldn't have the expert status you have in the Chile expat community. Every post you make solidifies yourself as an expert and builds upon that reputation. Just look at some of the old posts here and you'll see that steady progression. You have built authority in Google and that translates into more business for your company. If anyone doubts this, search for anything about Chile and this forum or one of your other sites pops up. That's a big factor in why you run the forum and that's probably worth $30k per year.

I haven't bothered to go through the thread about a special place for old fogies, but I will sometime. Another idea is to offer a set of forums for long time posters, give them special forums to go to where the best information lies and they can post that information and share. Let newbies pay a subscription of $10 a month to hit those forums for information.

I used to be a bell ringer for free information, but the truth is that free information is devalued information. If you are paying for information then you put a higher value on that information.

I would think that if people had to pay the traffic would slow to a trickle. I think getting the odd referral or potential customer from someone coming here for free as is currently the case is a better business model myself.

Na, I have no intention of charging a subscription fee for the site or even doing something like a forced registration. I have considered using the forum to sell stuff that is not directly related to our services. The thinking being that members (and others) can support the forum, without creating any sort of obligations that might arise in either a paid service or a donation sort of way.

The chile forum coffee cup.
topic6026-36.html#p64616

The problem with the forum is that it is one of those things with a very intangible value. It costs me time and money to operate, on the other hand it saves me time needing to answer Chile 101 questions by email and it does bring clients.

As for keeping technical skills up, not a lot to it. Any idiot can download and install these packages. I have not written much more than 1 or 2 lines of original script in years, nor had a need to. Most technical things come down to small tweaks.

It is more the making it work on the internet problem, than technical.

As I see it, the OP was initially related to the possibility of posting intentional "dis-information" on the forum, rather then unintentional "mis-information". As the topic unfolds, this seems to be not the case here. Hence -- the title of the topic was consequently changed to the present wording, namely, forum "discussion" tactics.

As no one here voiced any opinion that would prove such a possibility, the OP was possibly mis-guided, or somehow mis-impressioned, about any possibility of intentional "dis-information" presented on the forum whatsoever.

A good forum -- for good people, period.

-A

Therefore -- the #1 option, namely, "absolutely none... allchileans are always paragons of polite virtue" is something that I am going to vote (right away).

-A