Insim under new management!

[Immortelle]

Sadly, I suspect that letter is spelling out the end of Insim.  This guy is incredibly stupid.

[kenmtl]

I'm an online marketer and website design/host/development guy. My plans for these sites are two-fold. First, I want to  keep them going in the tradition that Kathy and Eric have already established. Second, I want to make them profitable enough that we can add functionality and hardware to handle the increased traffic that the sites have experienced lately and will likely continue to experience when The Sims 3 is released in February.

You do not buy a website without knowing exactly what you're getting and what it's potential is. So either he's a complete idiot who bought something sight unseen or he was informed as to exactly what he was getting, was informed about the whole pay/free debate, and was assured that there was potential for a profit to be made of this site and within the Sims 2 community. I wonder where that information came from? Who would know all about InSim/InSimadult and it potential. If this is for real and it appears it is, it was properly researched and evaluated and planned in advance. I hope they made a few bucks of this.  That's the only answer that makes sense to me. Or this is a complete debacle for our amusement.

[Souvenirs]

When I saw his post and the subscription poll, my jaw dropped.  And he's thinking of making subscriptions mandatory for InSIM adult?  WTF?

Where did Kathy and Eric get this guy?  If it were my site, I'd talk to the moderators I knew best and see if anyone could take it, not hand it off to some guy who looks like he's trying to make money off of it.  Again, WTF?

[LadyDea]

This is unbelievable. Is it April Fools and I just didn't notice?

Insim's ship is sunk, or at least, will soon be.

[dietofworms]

Are we sure this isn't Thomas setting up another branch of his cult?

Even if this Walt guy is really the one taking over, it just smells to high heaven of eau de TSR. 

I don't know much about Insim, stopped going there a long time ago,so I don't care personally that it's going to go belly up.   

[BoogerNabbingCrust]

I guess the Insimenator will be sent to the booty.

[WedgewoodBlue]

No I don't think so, Insim itself he claims to be a voluntary sub, but the sister site, well that is another story all together.a

[LadyDea]

I'm biting my tongue at mentioning "Walt"'s plans (and thusly ending my three year mission of silence at Insim) about InSimAdult there. I breezed through the announcement, but I didn't see any mention for ISA and I didn't want to be the one to mention PMBD at InSim as I don't know about their policies. The "stop panicking, I R devil's advocate, it's only voluntary donation" thing was kinda getting on my nerves.

Gah, I've been hanging around MATY too much. Moar fight is not appropriate for everywhere. *slaps self*

[Yarp]

I'm an online marketer and website design/host/development guy. My plans for these sites are two-fold. First, I want to  keep them going in the tradition that Kathy and Eric have already established. Second, I want to make them profitable enough that we can add functionality and hardware to handle the increased traffic that the sites have experienced lately and will likely continue to experience when The Sims 3 is released in February.

You do not buy a website without knowing exactly what you're getting and what it's potential is. So either he's a complete idiot who bought something sight unseen or he was informed as to exactly what he was getting, was informed about the whole pay/free debate, and was assured that there was potential for a profit to be made of this site and within the Sims 2 community. I wonder where that information came from? Who would know all about InSim/InSimadult and it potential. If this is for real and it appears it is, it was properly researched and evaluated and planned in advance. I hope they made a few bucks of this.  That's the only answer that makes sense to me. Or this is a complete debacle for our amusement.

My guess is that it wasn't properly researched. Kathy has stated on the site that they end up paying. Everyone who owns a forum will tell you that member numbers mean dick when it comes down to it. Many people sign up, grab what they want and never return. Others may pop in every once in a while to make sure their username isn't removed. Most of the active members are kids so getting money from them is not an option. The others that have posted state openly that they do not have the means to offer 'anything but their support'.

As far as subscriptions go the guy had better look around at what he has to offer. While TSR has some decent creators to at least bring people in most of the creators on InSIM are new and not that talented when it comes to creating. a lot of the creators who did offer decent CC have retired or moved on for the most part. You can't expect half a dozen talented people to create enough to make the site worth paying for. From what I can see the majority of the members came for ONE thing: InSimenator. I am not saying there are no decent creators, by the way. I just don't think there are enough making new meshes to be worth paying a subscription for.

I think that if the guy makes InSIMadult pay he will lose the only creators worth going there for. This whole ordeal is a shame because InSIM was a decent place. I'm not giving up on it yet. It depends on what he does with it.

[calalily]

I find it very hard to believe that Kathy and Eric wouldn't add some sort of no-going-pay clause to the sale, but I don't know either of them so  can only imagine what went on there.

Kathy has long since banned discussion of PMBD, or any links to it - so colour me unsurprised that there is no clause.  I have no doubt that as an online marketing guy, Insim will be soaked in ads and slapped onto the screen dripping.  I don't think his cunning plan will work though.

[Yarp]

Kathy does allow links to it in the WCIF thread. I think there is ONE thread to discuss the paysite debate too. But yeah, for the most part it's off limits. Personally I think the site is already dripping with ads. I hate going there without being signed in. The ads are in the threads as well as all around it. I can't imagine where else he'd be able to squeeze the ads in.

[redisenchanted]

Well that surely sucks. I recommend everyone download everything they might want from the site post haste. With Marvine gone, there's just a handful of good creators there, and those might not be happy about going pay. Warlokk won't, I don't think BlooM, Enayla or Gothplague will either.

Sounds like everything's going down in flames there pretty soon.

[BoogerNabbingCrust]

  I do hope they do not go pay. It's a sad day indeed.

[calalily]

Kathy does allow links to it in the WCIF thread. I think there is ONE thread to discuss the paysite debate too.

Last I read, it was banned - which is when I promptly stopped advertising my site there, deleted my update thread and stopped doing anything there but thanking people for downloads.  She went and changed that later - it was no PMBD for a while.

[Anouk]

Delphy PWNS Walt:
In case it disappears:

Hey Walt,

Since you've admitted to not being a technical guy I really don't expect you to understand this - but be aware that:

1) You've just taken over a new site. I seriously recommend stabilising things before spending money on a new server.

2) Before spending money you should always look at actually optimising what you have! Heck, you complain that vBulletin is "older" forum software (which is completely untrue, but hey, you said you weren't technical...)... yet MTS2 runs 3.0.7 which is even older... yet we have features that are only just now beginning to show up in the 3.8.x versions. In addition, becuase we (aka I) have the technical knowledge, we can optimise the servers to be very very fast but still push some 20TB a month in bandwidth with 2-3k members online.

One of the things that any self-respecting server administrator knows is that just throwing more powerful hardware at the problem does not make it go away!. I mean, seriously, an 8 core machine with 3-4 times as much ram? That, I'm afraid, is a mistake.

You can get much better speed ups from simply having less powerful servers but more than one and actually configuring things properly! It's what all the big sites do - and frankly I think that your single-server upgrade is only going to help for a while especially when you think about lack of bandwidth aggregation and having to pay more for extra bandwidth than you would have if you just had multiple servers. I come from a site where I have 6 servers, all seperated in task, and none of them more powerful than a dual core with only 1 having 4gb ram. So, yeah, from a technical standpoint, your server upgrade plans really don't work in the long run.

If you really want this site to survive then you need to rethink how you go about this particular task.

3) No offense, but all these "polls" and stuff asking for peoples input right when you start really... I dunno, it doesn't sound right. What you should have done was to lay low for a while, talk to your staff and get their input on the donation problems, how to improve things, etc.

A rule of thumb in running a site like this: Ask your staff before you do ANYTHING - especially when you make major changes like this. You failed to do this and instead starting posting announcements and so on - which I can understand, I really do - I just think it was too early and too soon and likely to make a lot more people unhappy.

Stabilise your donation plan internally - get suggestions from your staff and only then actually announce where the site is going. After all, it may be a community site, but you with your staff run it - ultimately you saw where it's going.

Oh and my last question:

4) How much would it cost to buy the domain and servers from you?

I understand how hard it is to run a site like this and I appreciate you wanting to "make your mark" - It's just my opinion that you've perhaps done it the wrong way. With that said, if you want to talk about servers, coding, etc, or even about the sale price for the site and domain, let me know.


Regards,
Delphy