Bill2Clone wrote
What do you fear exactly?
Hi Bill ~ You've been around a while, I suspect you realize that we fear exactly nothing... *grin*
It's just a simple matter of taking responsibility for the things we do, or enable other folks to do. We also trust our users. But the the human dynamic of forums is that the "squeaky wheels get the oil". It's been fun to be watching the UsersOnline stats from the front page. At any given moment, we usually have about 150 authenticated users on the site, some posting... but I've seen as many as 5000 lurkers ( non-authenticated users ). We do feel some obligation to ensure that if we provide resources ( whether those are "hard" resources like code / documentation, or soft ones like available forums or Wiki, etc ) to support and manage those effectively.
As I indicated, we're very happy for folks to post about their experiences, positive and negative in a general forum if they feel led to do so. But allowing folks to post in a general forum, and creating a feature for it specifically are not the same thing. Here are a few questions to ask yourself if you are an "owner" of a site as to whether you want to make an offering like that...
- Would it comprehensively address the issue? It would not cover everyone, merely those who were posted about. And so in some ways could also be considered a disservice because it doesn't give comprehensive coverage.
- Would it be fair, even to those who are represented? Maybe, maybe not. While nobody likes to hear about a bad experience, I've occasionally had a bad experience with a very good provider ( in any industry )... sometimes things just happen. Human nature dictates that we usually hear about the bad things, and "no news is good news".
- There is much speculation in the hosting community that folks plant a lot of self-promotion and / or manipulate public rating tools. I would like to hope this is not true of anyone hosting for DNN, but the fact is that it is a viable market niche and some folks will do anything to make a quick buck.
- Are our resources better spent doing other things? There is no shortage of things for us to be doing, and managing a forum and the kinds of potential issues that can arise ( especially when merging customers / partners ) is not a distraction that we want to tackle at the moment.
- Is it fair to our benefactors, sponsors and advertisers? All of those folks have put both their money and their personal commitment "where their mouth is". While its not an endorsement, it should be one of those factors that indicates a character quality of a host... about the only tangible characteristic we can provide at the moment.
As I indicated before, it's not at all that we don't think a resource for helping locate a DNN host is not a good idea. It would be great. We just don't believe that an open forum is a good solution for that. And we don't have the resources to commission the kind of resource we'd rather see. Now, if you would like to work with some folks to establish some sort of "yardstick", an objective questionnaire or list of quantitative/qualitative measurements that specifically address DNN hosting... that would be interesting. Perhaps we could make some progress toward a more comprehensive solution.
Thanks for taking the time to bring it up... and caring about it in the first place. Folks passions for things are what keep this project humming.
Cheers