I estimate that 90% of the content here has been sales threads, or links to sales threads elsewhere, since before change of ownership.
There is an obvious interest on the part of the owner to attract a larger membership and attain more paying members and income. It's a commercial endeavour and not operated out of goodwill.
There's precious little original discussion content being posted here and much of the content is being link-lifted from other blogs. Although I sometimes find these links can be useful to me, often I look at many of these sites independently.
It's exceptionally difficult to operate a successful forum and I'm aware of other struggling domain name forums with at least one attempting to focus on just new gTLDs as its USP.
If nobody is prepared to consistently write interesting content that others wish to read, whether for free or paid, I would expect the status quo. Most members appear to wish to buy and sell domain names. Nobody appears to be writing.
In my opinion there probably isn't sufficiently enough going on for any domain forum to solely focus on just .uk when a section on a larger industry wide domain name forum could achieve a similar result with more overall support and economies of scale.
Any domain name forum is going to have a very hard time competing against the obvious number one forum in the industry unless it offers something radically different than what can be offered mainstream, perhaps such as IDN or non English. The number one has dedicated writers and full time staff as well as most of the answers to questions I read that aren't .uk specific. I recently signed up there and I enjoy reading and contributing there for a number reasons, not least the alternative perspectives. I very much like being able to "shop around" for interesting discussion across multiple forums.
When some new members join here I have noticed a recurring theme whereby many don't stick around for very long. A forum needs new contributors so in my opinion this isn't ideal. Unfortunately nobody is tasked with being patient or nurturing them and I don't consider there seems to be enough going on here to retain interest. I don't know what to do about that because it requires time input and I suspect most of us are not interested in contributing our time gratis or have other things we need to be doing. If nobody is spending to achieve it and nobody is volunteering it probably won't happen.
I've noticed some previous regulars quietly depreciate their contribution here or disappear completely this year for whatever reasons. I haven't enquired about why.
I am however largely fine with the status quo because I believe it's driven by what the market wants. If I decide one day I wish to start actively marketing .uk domain names then I might consider paying to be a member here in order to receive the additional benefits. Otherwise I'll happily go where the content I find the most interesting currently is and don't feel any obligation to spend more or less time at any one forum.
After reading the post by
@Bailey last night I pondered what might happen if
@admin simply decided to turn this place off with no notice (that likely won't actually happen) and how I and others would be affected. What would I and others do, I thought. I think there would be a small number of regular sellers who would feel some immediate pain,
@bluerock and
@signature, immediately spring to mind. I wonder if some others would consider it a weight off their mind because some seemingly log in to be frustrated.
I wonder whether anyone else would bother to set somewhere else up and be bothered to administer it because it's an arduous task.
I've said my piece but I'm not unhappy with the current situation but if someone has any interesting suggestions for
@admin I'm sure he's all ears.
