I'm just a bit confused. Krumpet's post, I thought was a good insight and a differing opinion. His comment about it being a soap opera, I don't get why that would be taken offensively?
I admit that the balance of fun that you describe is extremely beneficial to the cause but the lack of balance between entertainment and intellegence is what has caused all of the stirring that is happening. Many people here have very poor judgement as to when to be serious or when to be a drama whore... Building freesite sympathies is the same as building an image - which is again, the whole damn problem.
Those are some mighty big words to be throwing around. Lack of intelligence eh? Drama whore? Explain to me how that is helping? Aren't we discussing this issue because we want suggestions as how to improve the situation? How is saying many people here have poor judgment helping? Oh, because you just shrugged it off? This is thing I think your failing to understand, our mission statement:
Firstly, we hate paysites. Are you a paysite owner? Well, we hate you, too.
We do it because it will piss you off. Yes, we are assholes. Tough.
Besides, you're only charging for bandwidth, right?
Isn't it so nice of us to contribute our $100/yr to alleviate your bandwidth load?
No? It pisses you off? Great! And now you know why we do this.
May I even go out onto a limb and suggest, that we can infer that from out mission statement we are meant to be assholes with "poor judgment" just to piss off paysites?
Free Sites don't get promoted period.
Just out of curiousity, I went on looked on the BBS list of fan sites. I will admit, I was basking my ignorance, and just assuming.
Here is the link. Just out of curiosity, I clicked on some links and checked some websites. A good portion of those sites, are free sites. The big problem, they either aren't active, or haven't been reached by PMBD's movement. So I will like to correct my earlier statement and say, that Free sites
DO get advertisement. They just might not be the sites we want, or have reached yet.
A 12 year old whose first experience is the fansite (paysite) listing on the Sims 1, 2, or 3 official EA sites is not going to go to free sites because essentially the only free content sites on there are Parsimonious and Simply Styling both of whom have content that plays to tastes not held by the average 12 year old BBS member.
Subsequently, my statement above, proved this to not be true. There are tons of freesites listed on the BBS. The big problem I noticed, they did not correctly label paysites as being paysites. What's the point in differentiating between the two, if you only list one category?
Why don't we have one of these?
Snarky, I would assume there isn't a full complete one because it would literally be to much to handle. Which is why I always assumed there wasn't an "official" listing of free sites on PMBD. I do think it would be a nice idea, but putting it all into one huge post, with no form of organization, can give major headaches to try and read through. Although, I do tend to try to direct people
to Black Pearl Sims that has sites divided up by what content they carry, or based on how much a specific type of item was requested on which items carry that item. Also
GOS has a pretty comprehensive list of what items they carry.