Spartan

[Patrick]

Guys, we had to ban Spartan. He sent a PM out trying to trash the moderators here and encouraging everyone to come to his site. The PM is junk. There's no truth to any of it. I guess he wasn't trying to befriend us afterall. Weird. I can't believe he used us like that.

I'll address each part of it here.

My dear fellow forumers:

I am probably one of the older members on this forum. I previously had over 1,000 posts here as Sooner&RiceGrad, and then the place got under my skin and every little TOS addendum started to bug me. What writerranger mentioned about a quater for a smiley and a buck for an avatar is very true of what this forum used to be. That is gone (but a new system of displaying donors is about to be instated here to fill Todd's business needs) but Todd's TOS is still king I believe. The signature quoting and Anderson stupidity has led me to consider leaving this forum.

There is no such system of donors being instated. We've moved to an advertising model, and are receiving some money from Yahoo ads, and searching for advertisers (Wilson Mechanical is a sample.....Todd got half price off his Heat and Air service in exchange for the ad!!). Anyways, the Yahoo ads only pay around 20% of our costs. Todd, Keith, and I are splitting the rest for the time being. We didn't want costs to be an issue to our members.

In regards to the signatures, the signatures were taking user's quotes out of context in an attempt to mock the user. Such harassment of other users violates the Terms and Conditions. It's as simple as that. No addition was needed to the Terms and Conditions. We at first allowed the practice, but soon everyone started doing it, and it became a real eyesore for the site.

A year and a half ago I left this forum. The truth is that the stupidity was only a reason. I had a forum in the works for the entire state, an entirely differant concept. Not only did I want to spend more time on that but Todd and Patrick had begun to give me trouble over that. In their mind it is a very competing concept. Apparently OKC Talk, in their minds, is the only place where one can talk about anything in the state of Oklahoma.

He kept coming to our site and harassing our members about his site, spamming them a million and a half PMs a day. After numerous complaints from our members, we put an end to it. It had nothing to do with it being a competing concept. If the dude would've treated us with any respect and been willing to work with us, we might have offered him a domain and some software. That's what we've done for our very own okcpulse. Check out okcpulse.com - Oklahoma City's Online Magazine sometime. Problem is, Spartan fired similar PM's to our members at that time, spouting off all sorts of trash. We don't allow spam here.

This is wrong. About a month and a half ago the forum I'd been working on for a long time was indeed hacked. Prior to this it was noted that OKC Talk was in the business of taking down our legal flyers in downtown.

What? I have absolutely no idea what this dude is talking about.

Spartan, you get what you pay for. If you would've paid for server space instead of using a free site that wasn't owned by you, you wouldn't have had the problem, and wouldn't have lost all of your information. We PAY for server space, and we PAY for nightly back ups of our data, with the hope that since we are PAYING for a service, the server is obligated to provide service for us. With the nightly back-up, we won't lose much if the site ever does get hacked.

Sure, our bills may be a little higher than those using free sites, but we can't be shut down by the owner of a free site....the software belongs to us because we PAID for it, and the server space is ours because we PAID for it.

Spartan, we tried to tell you this back when you started your state site, but all you could ever do was bash us for our expenses. You laughed at us for paying server expenses.

I did restart though, from ground zero at http://bull****.Org where, should the final straw in the reincarnation of Gradgate occur, I would love to see you all register and continue posting by my side. I have enjoyed your company in debate and I think you would all make great OkMet members.

I bet you would. Can you leave a quarter on our toilet please for using it?

And we promise we will never instate a stupid policy, and then change our minds over it about 4 times while leaving you hanging. We do not consider this proper service, you see, and we will also never beg for a single penny, unlike Todd's bumming. All that I will ever bum for is activity. (Yes I liken it to bumming when you ask for thousands for something that hasn't even costed OkMet over a hundred)

Sincerely,
Nick.

When we first started this site, we were using the best server around to offer the fastest service, and we were offering a lot of features. We've since determined we can get by on a cheaper server, and most everyone here just wants a message board and the Photo Gallery...that's it.

So when we first started, we were trying to get help from our users to pay the bills for tall of the bells and whistles we were trying to offer. But, we've since cut costs by cutting features, and we've found other ways to pay the bills. I do appreciate those that stepped up to the plate and helped us pay our server bills when they were due.