Who pays for it, really?

[anon]

The idea of all this being totally free, as in beer, is great. But someone is paying for the bandwidth and servers. What's really going on here? The point is planning for the future...

I would much rather pay for something,  and know it will be around to depend on, than live in a fairy tale where servers and bandwidth is all free...

[Will <Nabble>]

Nabble is self-funded at this point. The founders code it and run it and have money. But nothing last for ever, the question is what to do when it ends. It's actually quite simple, you can get a full export of your forum if you or we become tired of this whole thing. We can export it in xml format. You can restart somewhere else. Does that sound reasonable?

By the way, we do have a good idea to make money on forums without using banner ads or google ads. But it all depends on having many people using Nabble. So, if you like us and wish us good luck, please use us as as much as you can.

[Nalicter]

Personally, I really didn't mind the advertisement banners when they were here. They weren't obstructive (i.e. the bottoms of posts and such; they weren't huge), and they were actually about interesting things. I would much prefer they came back than Nabble went out.

As far as Nabble getting more users goes, I think it's on its way. However, to speed this along, I might recommend getting some popular sites out there to use Nabble forums (maybe easier said than done). I still think adding the friend feature will help Nabble a lot in this regard, as well, adding a more community feel to the forums. That, and the ranks for the number of posts (i.e. if you get a higher rank for having posted a larger number of posts, it's an incentive to post more—I know it works with me, anyway, on the lemmasoft forums: see http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/). The ranks actually have names, though; they're not stars or numbers (i.e. Newbie, regular, veteran, etc.); being able to customize these names per forum would be a great way to enhance the user experience, I think (of course, posting a million posts in Nabble Support shouldn't affect your rank in Fantasy Writing, and so perhaps there should be a Nabble-wide rank as well). I highly recommend looking at how they do it in the forums I linked to. Just look at individual posts and you'll see the info off to the side about the person.

[retobg]

It's certainly great that one can get a full export of a forum - but the second paragraph scared me a bit:

Will <Nabble> wrote

By the way, we do have a good idea to make money on forums without using banner ads or google ads. But it all depends on having many people using Nabble. So, if you like us and wish us good luck, please use us as as much as you can.

I checked for privacy statements on the nabble site and didn't find one. Big knowledge on relations between peoples and topics can be of a big value, but is commercialization of it in the interest of the people providing it?

[britishpages]

This is good news. I will be expanding my photo album and would hate to lose all those pictures submitted.