Very interesting answer (post) of yours; makes me think more and gives me reason (inspiration) to share things that without you I hardly will find the positive 'impulse' to post here.
At first, I'd like to say my "
THANK YOU" for sharing valuable online experience with me (and with all of us over here)! It's like a good feedback and sort of knowledge that we could never get in this form, without you (at least not now; who knows when someone will share something and even shared it, it wouldn't be this unique and clear!)
I'm not surprised that there have been lots of attempts to co-opt you. Except the sites, who doesn't need content (comments, articles, etc.), every website owner/owners (when they really cares about their websites) is going to value a user/member, who is posting good, than others, who just do nothing special there. I think it's very clear that you here are more useful than someone, who just register to make a profile with anchor-links in the signature and then left forever. I think it's also very clear that you're more useful and valuable than others, who post only 1-sentence posts.
There is why, you're like a 'treasure' for every community that respects its quality content and quality growth.
You've gotten leery when folks want greater participation? I'm the opposite: I feel leery when folks don't care about it.
(
Once you show them you can be a very good member, they are going to want more and more. (I mean the normal webmasters, not those real fools from sites mentioned in our forum too, who lose many of their best members, because they don't care about the problems in their websites!) So, I think every website owner is going to like greater participation, but I'm against it to bother and to insist. It shows lack of good manners. That's why our ethical code here is to value and to help people like you, but you'll never get pressure about how many posts to post, how many times to come back in a week/month or where to post/not to post. It's all up to you and this is the way it has to be, because we're free people and we do respect the normal freedom. )
Full admin privileges. The real full admin privileges are, if you can control the control panel. There you can delete all the website or to take a full backup and so on. This is just for common information. I do agree that any kind of admin control (full or not full) is a great faith and responsibility.
I have to add that many of the site owners (in case they can't write by themselves or have no time to do so), HAVE TO ORDER/HAVE TO PAY for articles (or posts). There are different prices, but just for example: probably 1 article will cost you USD 5.00 and one post will cost you USD 0.01. Some people work as online copywriters and they can earn some money from writing. That's why I wonder how some of the others are able to spend hours in free work like in Wikipedia, where they don't get money AND EVEN some of them have to DONATE money! I don't understand them. Time is money, money is money. (And it's not only in Wikipedia. You can see the same behavior in Reddit, for instance. Isn't it?)And he closed the site due to personal obligations in his life?
Really? Terrible!
If it was a good website (I suppose it was), he could try to sell it. Online there are so many options to sell a good website. (Recently 'good' equals to good traffic and/or good incomes and/or brandable and/or good, brandable urls...)
You sort of had to earn your standing by posting quality posts? Well, it's good (from my perspective) to posting quality posts,
but 'had to earn' I think is too much. And you can be 100000000000000000% sure
that I mean it, because here we don't kick out even people with 0 (no) posts. Tolerant enough.
But later on it came out that the donations to the site became the owner's personal pocketbook? Wowwww, that's nasty! I already said that I can't see the point when people post for free
PLUS donate their money to somebody's website!... And this is one of the reasons that we
NEVER implemented (the very easy by the way) option of donations here. All I want is ADS from wealthy people, BUT I don't want to get our members' money and cash. In my 'golden mean' ( the desirable middle between two extremes) is: you folks are welcome to post your quality or not that quality content, but I don't want your money! Ads are okay. And if there are ads, we should use the money to pay the hosting and the domain and the rest -- share, not only one to take 100% of the profit.Well, I also think that we should always looking under the covers so to say at what might be hidden out of sight. For example, if there are ads (not just Google AdSense, which currently with our insignificant traffic is just around the level 'enough to cover our hosting plan and our domain'), we should show all the incomes clearly (transparently) and then to say: this is for that, this is for me, this is for you and this is for them. This is the way I see the things -- as honest as possible. (So I see it like: the CEO or manager of the site, if you or somebody as you became this, should take a bigger part of the income. This is not a kind of discrimination to others. This is a kind of fair 'game'.)
It becomes hard to identify those well intentioned with those aiming for ulterior motives? Let me give you a hint. Pretty simple and maybe a sort of 'vulgar', but I am sure you will get it straight: They ask you to pay = not very well. They don't ask you to pay = well. They are ready to pay you = very well. (I don't mean only money, I mean the immaterial payments as well, but you got my point: here we're not going to ask you for money and we're going to offer you good payment, if we get the level. I state it openly and in public, so you can trust it.)
Have a good time! I'm going to optimize the forum's stuff like errors' log and others.