This is fun.......

 

I didn't take any offence to that comment at all and it was my thread. Just thought he was trying to get more details. Kind of what I expected since it was sort of a teaser thread.

 

I think the liar part is pretty bad, and this thread almost got ditched as soon as it started. I assumed we would get some sort of response form the other side, but they may not wish to engage. Again, I will not say i believe or disbelieve his statements, but stand by my point that it is entirely possible he is being truthful. I am pretty positive that even if it does make a profit, its probably pretty small. I say this from experience with both big and small sites.

Personally, I don't think he should even have gone into details of numbers for the exact reason that people will scrutinize whatever you say even if it is the exact truth. If I listed the expenses for this site, I am sure we would have people calling us either liars or idiots.

Also, if he includes his time in the cost factor for the site, then its very possible it makes no profit. And honestly, his time should be included. Running a site takes up a lot of time in a not fun way. Even as a smaller site, there is reason to not use some random 10/month hosting service. You are very limited in your access and control of the site. So paying 100/mo for a hosting facility where you can go in and do what you need is totally reasonable. Additionally, looking at the number of vendors and the cost to be a vendor, we are not talking about that much money per year. If I were in his shoes, I would not consider it a profitable venture even being that it looks as though it makes a bit more than its hard expenses. And that is now. For the first few years, it probably made much less. Sorry for going on about this, but since they wont post their side, I just felt its important to post this viewpoint.

Another part of your complaint (and really the bigger part) was about the thread being deleted. Well it could be different for your example, we have had similar things happen here. For whatever reason, we have completely banned vendors. In at least one occasion, a banned vendor repeatedly made additional false accounts to promote the business and make false positive reviews/comments. As a result, we become hyper sensitive to suspicious posts made regarding that vendor. When this happens, we investigate the member making the post, and if we see any kind of connection, we delete it. The management for dcevo may have done the same, or at least thought they found a connection. DTM is a very sensitive topic over there, so it makes for a kind of similar situation although for different reasons

 

Thanks for your unbiased information, Charles.

I don't think that Aaron needs to post his side. There really isn't a side to this. The only thing he can do is come on here, and open his accounting on a globally, public site to justify his site's business practices. Sounds a bit ridiculous to me.

Aaron merely stated his costs to indicate that he is in the venture for pleasure and not proft. I believe him without a doubt.

I know there's a lot of work that goes into the site. He will generally respond to any software issues the same day. Upgrades are done all the time. Changes are made, and he even polls the members for their opinions on how the site should look.

This thread was started to discredit the owner of DCevoclub. I should hope that the posts from it's loyal members would be enough to count as "the other side."

Sometimes, I think people get so upset about something they have to have it heard. But when I get upset at someone, I like to bring it straight to them.

BTW: The jeers from the peanut gallery is a bit of an indication of the personalities that DCEvoclub had to contend with. Sounds a bit like sour grapes to me.

 

It is interesting that you are here to complain about the business practices of the DCEvoclub and it's owners and admins and then in the 2nd part of your rant you are complaining about DTM being moderated on the forums.

You do not know the whole story behind why DTM was removed as a vendor. Most of the new DTM folks that get upset at the anti DTM atmosphere weren't even around when things happened. It's easy to say that DTM was taking business away so they we're removed, nah that's not the case. If you want a real answer sit down with Nick, Mike Ko, Berty and ask them the history with DTM and the history of everyone that was part of DTM past and present. You start digging for the truth and your going to be really surprised what you find out.

 

Oh boy.....I REALLY don't want to hear all that crap again. I'm fairly certain he's well aware of the past. It needs to just be left there. I know some, but don't really care to know anymore. It just doesn't matter. Seems things have calmed down and theres just no reason to start back up. I had hoped we were starting to see the hatchett buried which is what needs to happen. For everyone's sake. Time to move on.

 

I've had an Evo in the DC area since October 2003 and have been around the Evo community online and offline as long as anyone (yes, believe it or not there are people who race Evos and go to shops who aren't on the forums!!). And more to the point, I was a moderator on DC Evo Club when the decision to ban DTM was made. I was right in the middle of it all, including the behind-the-scenes discussions among nastea and the mods about DTM. The decision to remove them from the site was an unfair and unjust outcome and I resigned as a moderator because of it. Absolutely the wrong decision for the membership. To borrow someone else's characterization, there was a war on the board and everyone lost.

And at that point, I had never even stepped foot in DTM. It was only later that I went to DTM, found out that the "peanut gallery" was spot on in their glowing assessments of DTM, and became a sponsored customer of DTM. With DTM's set-up assistance, I took home trophies in my first two time attacks last fall. And everytime I go in there I am more and more impressed.

Brian/Juice is right -- if you start digging for the truth on DTM, you will be really surprised by what you find out, i.e., that DTM is one of the most professional and competent shops for Evos on the whole East Coast, if not in the whole country.

 

I don't want to start a war but I will respond to this as amicably as possible because I don't want this thread locked or deleted. My first point is that you have no idea who I am or who I've been working with. I met Mike Ko at the 2006 BBQ in August. Shortly thereafter, I began free lance working with DTM. I know the entire sordid history of DTM in this area because I have been around for the vast majority of that time. Mike and Nick quickly realized what kind of an asset I was and we worked out an arrangement where I helped them and they helped me. I have been their little secret for a long time. Publicly, no one really knew who I was involved with until I started posting about our experiences at the race track. Our client's knew who I was but the rest of the community really didn't.

It's funny that you are trying to bring up old dirt. I want you to take a second to think about what you are doing because there very well might be a good amount of information that you have been mislead on. I personally have no issues with Marti and that is the only reason I have not gone off about the issue of a particular company called The Speed Factor. Do you really want Berty to come in to this thread and post the truth of what occurred in the breakup of that company? Do you want the origins of VIP Garage to be exposed? Why is it that a new partner, you, needed to be sourced to help keep VIP afloat? What happened to Jonathan and the rest of the crew? Please think before you speak. I know that I do.

If you notice, I've put in bold that the entire reason for this thread is the fact that I feel that the owner of dcevoclub is lying about his expenses. I EVEN PUT THAT IN BOLD. This is not a DTM issue but an issue regarding someone who is misconstruing facts in order to justify himself. I never expected Aaron to come into this thread to explain himself. I posted this for members of that community to realize what it actually takes to run such a site because not everyone has an IT background and understands the kind of costs associated with running a website. I feel that I'm perfectly capable of disclosing such things because I have hands on experience in doing the exact same thing.

I did my research before posting. I posted facts that are verifiable by anyone with basic knowledge of the Internet and tools that EVERY PC in the world has installed by default. If there was conjecture in my post, it should be clearly evident due to the grammar used. The only area in which I cannot state a fact in regards to expense is his hosting fees. With that being said, there is enough information to make certain inferences such as dcevoclub being hosted on his business server. Because I DO run a community myself, I can make a correlation between my site and his based on the user base and the number of posts in each community. If my site with more users, more threads, and more posts with more features eats up less than 10GB a month of bandwidth it should be a no brainer that dcevoclub uses less than that. If my hosted sql database runs just fine on my cheap host with the number of users, I know he doesn't need a dedicated box to run dcevoclub. Now, if he has chosen to spend more money in order to have a more robust system, IT IS NOT BECAUSE DCEVOCLUB REQUIRES IT.

Do you understand my point?

 

I completely agree, Joe. But I didn't start this thread. Not saying you said I did. This was going nowhere but downhill from the moment it was started. There were some points of light on here, but I think those were going to happen anyway.

 

Why do you care how much it costs to run the site?
Are you responsible for the costs?
Are you asked to pay for it?
You say he's lieing, do you have all the facts?

Sounds like your trying to make something into something because your mad Nastea has again removed all DTM references that appear to be advertising, after the vendor was banned from said forums.

Looks 100% like your just mad and looking for something to poke at because your butt hurt over the actions he's taken on the forums.

Edit: Hosting seems to be provided by Layered Technologies, which charges a minimum of 129/month for the cheapest business class hosting package - add in that the cost has probably gone up each year, so let's say the average cost over the 5 years is 100/month or 6000, very close to the 5800 you had estimated - PharmEcis your so IT why didn't you figure this out or did you assume you we're the master 1337 hacker? A simple nslookup followed by an Arin search would have told you where his hosting was. C'mon dawg your so techy though man!

Admins of EvoM, this attack on Nastea was uncalled for an now proven to be completely false, and only occured due to the OP being upset by Nastea's actions on another board, trying to call out someone's business practices over a forum, wow bro! WOW!

 

Yup that was all I meant by my statement, glad you took it the correct way.

 

I guess I deserve your inferences since I've made some of my own. That being said, I am not bung hole hurt over what Aaron has done to DTM on his site. I don't agree with his actions but he has the right to run his site as he sees fit.

Unfortunately you still don't seem to grasp the reality of the situation. Since you are a paying vendor on the site, would you mind disclosing the amount you've spent in fees per month? I've been told by several sources that the amount I've used for vendor fees is actually quite a bit lower than what they are in actuality. Let's assume that my $5,800 figure is correct for his hosting and he really is paying ~$100 a month for his host on average. Do you really think that all of those hosting fees can be allocated directly to dcevoclub? Those hosting fees would be the amount that he pays for his main account, of which his primary IT consulting business SHOULD absorb the majority of the cost. I have quite clearly proven that dcevoclub runs off his phre.net box. The fees that he is then paying is primarily for phre.net and dcevoclub piggybacks off the same hosting. So why then lump in the expenses for your business into a site that is supposedly "non profit"?

Sure, dcevoclub should share some of the expenses for hosting but should not absorb the entire cost. Phre.net was registered in 2001, well before dcevoclub existed. At that time he still had to pay for hosting. Just because he decided to run another site on his host does not mean that now that new domain absorbs the entire cost for his hosting.

Aaron has stated that the advertisements on his site have netted him ~$50 in revenue. If the revenue is so **** poor, why even keep something that is so annoying and intrusive? It is quite clear that just vendor fees more than cover his expenses and have actually allowed him to MAKE money.

I am upset because Aaron IS twisting the truth to his members. I do not expect him to make a full disclosure as he honestly has no obligation to. What I DO expect is for him to not lie about the reality of the situation in order gain sympathy and twist reality.

I'll give you an example since you seem to be hard headed at grasping things. I run a business from my home. Because I run a business from my home, I can write off a portion of my mortgage as a business expense. I CANNOT WRITE OFF MY ENTIRE MORTGAGE BECAUSE MY ENTIRE HOUSE IS NOT USED FOR BUSINESS. I can only write off a percentage. So, if that is how the government looks at it, why can Aaron state that he has spent X dollars on running one particular site when it becomes quite evident that the money being spent is not only hosting a "non profit" site but also a site for his business? Perhaps the truth of the matter is that since he is actually making a profit from his "non profit", he wants to disclose his hosting fees into that organization so that it appears that his non profit truly is a non profit and not a for profit organization for tax purposes.

That my friend, is something called FRAUD.

 

OK...we are not going to get into vendor drama here. This thread is becoming useless quickly. Any warring, and it gets closed immediately.


Everyone made their point. Between the OPs side, and mine and MadMsheen's post, I think we can see both sides and how it can be view either way. Being I dont think we are going to hear anymore from the dcevoclub side, this matter is really over.

 

I cannot tell you what vendors pay for advertising on the forums. The adds that pop up when you are viewing the forum are quite annoying yes. Some of them very NSFW, they no longer pop up for me though. /wink I've removed that ability within Firefox settings


Why do you care so much man? Your not tied to DCEvoClub and you don't pay to post or be a member so the costs don't come down to the community.

Both with Jeeps and Bikes [gixxer.com] I had to pay to the forums to be a full fledged member, it was like $25 a year if I wanted to sell something. DCEvoClub doesn't require monetary supplement for you to be able to use it as you wish. I'm very surprised that EvoM hasn't been forced to require a member fee, thank goodness for Vendors

And you still don't know 100% what it costs to run the site, so accusing someone of FRAUD in all caps is slander bro.

 

You make some valid points. However, you especially, can understand there's a certain way to carry oneself to be taken seriously.

My "peanut gallery" comment still stands.

This thread was started as a slap in the face. Looks like it's going to only get worse. My opinion still stands: Aaron can run the board any way he sees fit. He can disclose whatever business or personal information of his choosing.

The more this thread goes on the more evident that it was created as a front to air out issues between DCEvoclub and DTM's customers.

I certainly hope this doesn't drive a wedge between friends I've known for years. I just don't think this thread was necessary in the least.