MikeB on 26 April 2009
MikeB wrote:
FYI, I for the amount of posts I wrote there I have very few abuse reports. I was an adminstrator there at a time, when I decided to leave the team (after many great team members left and I was left with a new team which was far less devoted and enthusiastic).
I should clarify further, I was once an editor for OSNews.com (this is after Phoenix though), during the beginning of the site I wrote a few best read articles (the first ones with over 100K hits) and became friends with at the time editor in chief Eugenia (most of our contacts were online, but once she did cook a nice chicken for me in Silicon Valley), her husband is an ex-BeOS developer.
Amiga.org was the best Amiga community website, but the site began to have issues for AmigaOS4 supporters. Anything AmigaOS4 got massively trolled on, nothing could be seriously discussed (MorphOS/AROS supporters were relentless with their trolling).
So I contacted David of Amigaworld.net, which was at the time a still very immature chatroom supporting website. We worked together, me diverting efforts from OSNews towards AmigaWorld.net, I made sure AmigaWorld.net got good exposure (at for example OSNews, we also paid for banners later on). Membership and forum activity skyrocketed, well beating Amiga.org eventually, which had a much longer history and thus much better known domain name.
Then we finally understood in part one of the reasons why Amiga.org had degraded so much, its owner was also employed by Thendic/Genesi. We only learned about this when he stated he was still owned 10,000 USD when Thendic banktrupted. The funny thing was that our website was genuinely non-profit community driven, while Amiga.org was not. While the bulk of insults and attacks until then claimed the exact opposite!
After these issues, Amiga.org turned slowly back to normal. Legal issues between key partner Amiga Inc and Hyperion showed up. Enthusiasm got a hit from that, David basically wanted to mirror what Amiga.org was doing (not primarily focus on AmigaOS4 anymore). For this of course a new team was needed, as the core team was mainly interested in focusssing on AmigaOS4.
Some people split off to start Amigans.net, AmigaWorld.net no more leading, but again lagging behind Amiga.org. AmigaWorld had become rather stale, in the past we organized special events, performed live streamed internet coverage from Amiga events, wrote exclusive articles and reviews, performed many dozens of interviews (mostly organized by me), we had our own booth at events, we did internet radio round-ups, etc, etc. Sadly the new team (which is a far less dedicated mixture) has let all of that gone to waste. Combined with setting bad examples (name calling) from moderators, I spoke my mind on their behaviour and thus got banned for a short while.
