Hey Doug! Great to meet you. Welcome to Website Forums. It sounds like you have a ton of experience.
Just curious, but how did you come across this forum?
Well, 100% full disclosure I found it on a hunt for leads for my new business.
The short answer there, is that I run a company which helps websites do better with their advertising. Part of that is finding new websites to approach to ask if they need any help with advertising... and boy is there a lot of websites on the internet. So I started to look for places where I could find groups of people that run websites... and a few google searches later here I was.
Now, the longer story of that is that I'm a super fucking old school forum guy. Used to manage BBS's back in the early '90s, so when the internet hit forums were my jam. I was a member of a lot of them, but I very much loved this niche skiing community called Newschoolers. I was a member for a number of years, I ended up getting hired to sell advertising, we ended up selling that company, we ended up creating a management company to help run it, and we ended up extending that to run a number of other sites. All of them based off of forums - though techincally I used to like to say "community" instead of forums, because advertisers didn't like forums back then.
Between that sale in 2007 and technically the present, I've been managing a number of websites, some of them forums, some of them more "media" focused (think: blog-ish) and many of them blended between the two. I still do that... though it has been very difficult to convince people to pay me for services to just help their site be "better".
All along, I've had a passion for forums, and I've been really saddened by how far they have fallen from the glory days. I really like the style of communication and the community that forms around them. I feel like its an excellent way for like minded people to interact, and frankly forums were the original social media. They were just too far ahead of their time... or maybe the technology didn't keep up with the times.
So half of me wants to just land more clients to help sites make more money, because they can improve themselves that way. The other half is on a mission from god to re-vitalize forums on the internet and bring them into the future that they not only deserve - but frankly invented in the first place.
What I really like is talking with other people that run websites. Its a crazy game, and I am a firm believer that the sharing of information helps everyone. This site seems to at least in principal fit that exactly.
TL;DR - Came here to spam the forum for clients. Realized it was a rad idea and I wanted to talk with other people that run websites. I also hate spammers who hit my own forums, so I self moderated rapidly.
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