First Anniversary of the GLORIOUS PEOPLE'S REVOLUTION!

[J. M. Pescado]

As you may or may have noticed, in about a week and a half, we will be celebrating the first anniversary of our GLORIOUS REVOLUTION in which Insim was liberated from vile Waltian Oppression! Someone append links to postings from the time of the Glorious Revolution so that those who missed it and those who miss it can relive the memories of those fun times.

[Jenna]

Viva la Revolucion!

A blow by blow description of those...tumultuous...times:

http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/1188549.html

[Tenshii~Akari]

Most of the screenshot links are dead in the fandom wank entry... but I did find a couple of screenies of that week.  

"In the beginning..."

It all started one fateful day, when all of InSim was slapped in the face with the most second most EPIC FAIL of posts in the history of the sims community:

(*Click Image for Larger View*)
The "Grand Public Speech" pic that's no longer viewable in FW, which is a direct copy/paste of the email he sent staff the previous weekend

(insert fandom wank details here)

In the end, he pulled the dumbest move anyone could think of...

(*Click Image for Larger View*)
(Read as:  "I bought the site for a ridiculous amount of money, and now I feel cheated.  So if you completely forget that you have site staff here and elect "board members" to work the site, I'll be willing to sell it back to them, for still much more than it's actually worth, in order to get my money back... great bargain, huh?!")

That... did not go over very well.

(...originally posted on SimSecret... whoever did this one, kudos to you on accuracy!)

Anyways, if anyone has any of the missing screenshots of the FW epic, feel free to share them... that is a time that should never be forgotten.  

[caffeinated.joy]

I think I still have some screen shots, but they're mostly of conversations between Walt and myself. I'm pretty sure I still have the ones where he brought up the subject of the site staff being paid and my typo-laden resignation to him.

[Jenna]

Nicely done, Tenshii! I'm totally stealing those screenshots for Viva la Revolucion week on ISA.

I think I have other screenshots of the comedy that was Walt's take-over; stuff like that you just have to save. If I can find them, I'll post them as well.

...and consider this topic Stickied.

[caffeinated.joy]

Ah hah! I had more than I thought. There's a lot more I'd had on my former hard drive but it died a tragic death along with the drive.

OK, Walt marched in, announced his acquisition, which was met with a crapload of WTF from the populace. I was bombarded with PMs and emails from folks asking questions I didn't know the answer to because I was as much in the dark as everyone else. Being the type to give a person the benefit of the doubt until I given reason not to, I sent him the following:

(You might have to click on the thumbnails twice to get them to full size)



And this was Walt's reply, in which he gave me the "important respected site member" BS and proceeded to tell me he wanted to ban the people who were demanding to know the facts:



Here is my reply where I suggest that starting his career out as site owner by handing out bans would be a Very Bad Move and suggest he just be honest. I'm still trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, but inwardly am rolling my eyes at the "pillarstone of the community" bit.



Now here's where I'm missing a few things. Walt disappeared for a few days and during this time I was still getting PMs and questions I couldn't answer because Walt was (still) telling us nothing. I sent Walt PMs and emails asking him to at least talk to the staff and get to know how things ran before blundering though and doing more damage. After almost a week, he hits the site with another announcement without talking to the staff, and sends me the following PM. After days of me begging him to open a discussion in the Staff area, he finally decides to do it at Gothplague 's suggestion (oh and hand me more crap about valuing my help). My a$$hat alert isn't just clearing it's throat at this point, it's yelling in my ear. Especially since this is the PM in which he suggests he take the first step into turning the site into a TSR clone by offering me money:



My response to him (which is quoted in Walt's ensuing reply to me):



OK, now let's move to the Q&A thread he opened in the Staff Area. I don't have a screen shot of his opening post, but it pretty much stated he wanted to open a discussion and mentioned he had an important announcement to make (but didn't say what that announcement was). Gothplague responded first and I (unfortunately) lost that screen cap, but I have mine and Odessa's. Here's mine and I'm getting fed up with his song and dance by this point:



And Odessa's response:



Finally after he proceeds to ignore all of us and demote the entire staff without warning, I tell him to stuff it. During this time he'd messed around with the AdminCP - something he admitted knowing nothing about - and borked it completely. The private staff area was public, member IPs were public ... it was a mess:



And that is my collection.

 

[J. M. Pescado]

Someone should find/make some Kathy/Eric/Walt Sims and Puddings and post them up so we can have a thread of effigious burnings.

[DaSpecial1]

I would gladly volunteer to make some if I knew what they looked like .  I vaguely remember creepy Walt from his fail video (I could only bear to watch a few sad seconds).

I wish I had copies of his "my mother survived the depression and that's why capitalism rocks" epic post. Viva la revolucion!

[caffeinated.joy]

Oh! I found the first email he sent me (no idea why I still have this. I deleted the others. LOL). It was a blanket email he had sent to entire staff and he lines out his plan$ for the $ite (A straight cut and paste - all I did was bold and make big the words he did):

Hi there.

Since you are one of our super-moderators at InSIMenator.net or Insimadult.net, I wanted to contact you first and introduce myself. My name is Walt Thiessen, and I have acquired the inSIMenator.net and insimadult.net websites from Kathy and Eric. They contacted me a couple of weeks ago because they needed to relieve themselves of the responsibilities of these sites so they can concentrate more time on other priorities. We reached an agreement, and the sites and server were transferred over to my control this past weekend. I'll be posting an announcement about this change on the sites soon, but I wanted to contact all the super-moderators first.

Eric has already agreed to continue to update his InSIMenator module for at least another year, and Kathy will undoubtedly still be around from time to time, as she will be answering questions for me behind the scenes. So while there has been an important change, it doesn't mean we're losing the two original founders entirely.

I'm hoping you'll stay on as a super-moderator and help me as I take steps to move these forums forward to the next level. I'm not a “gamer,” and I don't know much about The Sims, so I'm counting on you super-moderators to help me. Among other things, I'll be leaning on you heavily to continue to maintain the standards the sites current enjoy. I'll also be leaning on you for recommendations regarding moderator and super-moderator nominations.

I'm an online marketer and website design/host/development guy. My plans for these sites are two-fold. First, I want to  keep them going in the tradition that Kathy and Eric have already established. Second, I want to make them profitable enough that we can add functionality and hardware to handle the increased traffic that the sites have experienced lately and will likely continue to experience when The Sims 3 is released in February.

I want to share with you some of my ideas for the sites and server for your feedback. I'll also appreciate any suggestions you can make to help me with my transition in my new role.

New Server Planned

First and foremost, as soon as I took control of the server I noted that it is quite under-powered compared to what the demands of the website are. This is something I'm planning to change ASAP, probably by the second week of December. Currently, the sites are served on a dual-processor server which I took over from Kathy and Eric. Over the weekend, the heavy demand crushed them to the point that they were largely unavailable. I've put in a load limit to prevent them from crashing, but that's just a temporary fix. In the meantime, during peak periods some users will get messages saying that the server is too busy, asking them to try again later.

I'm planning to acquire an eight-processor server (plus 3-4 times as much RAM as we have right now) which will give us four times the processing power and should eliminate most (hopefully all) of the bottlenecks we've been experiencing particularly in times of high demand.

Insimadult.net Needs A Big Helping Hand

The Insimadult site is barely at break-even point according to Kathy and some months has been subsidized by the InSIMenator site.

Further, when I tried to transfer the advertising links by setting up a new account at Adbrite in my name, they forced me under a new policy structure they have into their “black label” section which is dominated by hard core porn advertisers. This resulted in a short period where some really hard-core ads hit the site on Sunday. As soon as I discovered what had happened, I pulled the ads and replaced them with some Amazon ads for Sims 2 and 3 products. However, such ads are not likely to pull as well as regular advertising, so it's likely that on-site ads at Insimadult are going to produce less revenue than before.

Obviously, this is a bad situation. If revenue was already no more than break-even before I acquired Insimadult, then we can't afford any revenue reductions for Insimadult. So I'm giving serious consideration to a subscription-based membership system of some kind so that we don't have to shut Insimadult down entirely. I'm also in contact with a large ad agency that specializes in advertising placements for adult websites, trying to discover if there are any alternatives we can use that won't hit Insimadult with hard-core porn ads while generating some reasonable ad revenue.

I'm trying to decide between a VOLUNTARY subscription-based membership system and a MANDATORY subscription-based membership system for Insimadult. With either approach, I'd work on creating some incentives for becoming a subscriber. The most obvious one I can think of is to remove advertising from the pages for logged-in subscribers. I'm also open to any other suggestions you can make regarding additional benefits to offer potential subscribers in order to induce them to sign up.

You know the users and members of Insimadult much better than I do,. Can you tell me what you think their reaction to a subscription-based system would be? Should it be voluntary or mandatory? I'm thinking of putting up a poll to ask them how much they'd be willing to pay on a monthly subscription to Insimadult with the following options: $0, $1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $10, $15, $20, and $25 Or More per month. I'd use the poll results to guide the minimum subscription pricing options we'd offer.

InSIMenator.net Needs To Stabilize Donation Model

As I looked at the financial history of InSIMenator.net, I found two things. First, the advertising revenue is consistent, but it's not large enough to finance the site sufficiently. The donation model that the site follows is critical to its success. Further, donation totals from month to month have varied dramatically. This makes management of the site a bit of a financial headache.

Similar to the Insimadult site, I'm thinking about implementing a voluntary donation model here as well. Unlike Insimadult, I'm not contemplating a mandatory subscription model for the InSIMenator site. I want to make it voluntary, which we'll need in order to grow the site. As with Insimadult, I'm thinking about making the subscriber experience advertising-free. Beyond that, I'd welcome from you suggestions about additional incentives and benefits we can offer in order to induce people to become members.

The potential for InSIMenators.net is very great. Over 400,000 people have become site members in the past 3.5 years. That's a sizeable pool, and it seems reasonable to me that we can get at least some of them to become subscribers. If only 1% of that 400,000 became monthly subscribers, it would provide sufficient financing to not only pay for the larger server needs but also to bring in professional developers to add various kinds of functionality to the website over time!

Current Bills Are High Right Now – Donations Are Needed

From the moment I took over the sites, I incurred some instant expense hits that haven't yet been covered by advertising or donation expenses. So far, in addition to the purchase price I paid to Kathy and Eric, I'm more than $750 in the hole in operating costs, and that's going to more than double with the new server acquisition. Plus, the vBulletin licenses for the forum and database are coming due at the end of this month. So I'm going to be putting out a donation drive request, which I'm hoping people will enthusiastically support. We need to raise money fast in order to do the things that need doing.

Polling For User Input On Both Sites

I'm going to put out some polls over the next couple of days to measure user input on a number of things.

First, as I mentioned above, I'm going to poll on the subscription idea to get a sense of how willing users are to support the sites financially on a regular basis.

Second, I'm going to offer a poll about whether they think the sites needs a “face lift.”

Third, I'm going to ask for suggestions about additional features and benefits they would like from the sites.

I'd appreciate it if all super-moderators could encourage people to take these polls. The more input we get, the better.

That's all for now. I'm sure I'll be in touch with you all as we move forward. Feel free to contact me with any input and suggestions you have. Also, I welcome your suggestions as to who should be promoted to moderator or super-moderator positions on an ongoing basis.

Yours Sincerely,

Walt Thiessen
Dirt Cheap Advertising LLC

Then, without waiting for our feedback, he went ahead and plastered his polls on the site, asking people how much they would be willing to pay on a monthly basis.

A Walt sim. I seem to remember someone had made one and offered it up for sharing. I wonder if it's still about. I'll have to hunt for it.

Edit: Guess not. Thinking about it, it may have been a sim someone made, tortured and took pictures of to share here.
 

[Tenshii~Akari]

   Pescado's Proposal of Pure Awesomeness:

(*Click for Larger View*)

Hoping someone actually does have more of those missing shots captured somewhere.  It's kind of hard for those who weren't here to get the full picture of what happened.   

[Jenna]

Hah!

I'm still digging through my flash drives trying to find the ones I saved; they included a copy of that email, and some other really amusing ones. Hell, I think I saved all of the old screenshots.

I think my favorite of the batch was where Walt declared "the future of the site is bright!" and Pescado replied with "Much the same way a BFVFS is bright."

[caffeinated.joy]

Dasi was asking about a picture of Walt. My photobucket account shall not be sullied by his image, so I give you a link to one of his sites.

Clickity!

Edit: Broken coding! I'll get it right yet!

[Jenna]

That reminds me...



(click it)

[J. M. Pescado]

I like the part where he declared I was no one important, no doubt to the snickers of everyone else.

[DaSpecial1]

Just as I remembered him, expect completion this weekend...though I don't know if I have dorky enough hair in my CC. 

I like how he ignored you and went on Thanksgiving vacay (completely oblivious)--to the outrage of some and snickers of those of us who knew he seriously underestimated you.



P.S Where should I post said Walt sim?