UKBREWER72
New Member
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2014
- Messages
- 1
- Reaction score
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Hi guys-hope you are all well. I would just like to share with you a little story that is happening back over here.
(Mods-this is real,please do not delete before you get to the end-it may happen here)
The Homebrew Forum was set up as a small independant website by some really amazing guys who wanted a community for brewers by brewers. It had a lifespan of around 6 years & was one of 2 main brew sites in the UK with 10K+ members. Over that time the phpBB site was honed & tweaked into really something I can only describe as a thing of joy. A one stop shop for help,advice with all the calculators,recipes & bells & whistles that you could ever need.
You will notice I used the word was.
The forum grew too large for the original owners to manage & go to work/have lives/sleep/brew-delete as applicable.
Then one of them had an idea.
Why don't we find a professional web hosting company to run it for us?
Our community based forum was then sold to Group Builder-who in the space of 96 hours this week have utterly destroyed it.
No free speech,dissenters are banned. We had a few sponsors,but mostly the site was ad free-now its almost unrecognisable as a beer forum. We don't even have agreed TOS. Our PM system is down,our Group chat function is down,many many recipes have been lost. VBulletin-the new software to replace phpBB won't even recognise our regional punctuation eg the pound sign-so many more posts have been corrupted. We were kept in the dark about these changes until after the event. Even the new frontpage doesn't work. Austin-our contact person-has managed to duck away this weekend leaving no support staff to sort out any of the problems-leaving the UK mods & admins an impossible task. As such most of them have now resigned in disgust. Funnily enough their leaving posts have been deleted to cover up all signs of the havoc caused by this shyster outfit.
I fully expect to be kicked here as well, but would just like to take this opportunity to point out just how shabby Group Builder really are.
Kind regards, Jim from the UK
(Mods-this is real,please do not delete before you get to the end-it may happen here)
The Homebrew Forum was set up as a small independant website by some really amazing guys who wanted a community for brewers by brewers. It had a lifespan of around 6 years & was one of 2 main brew sites in the UK with 10K+ members. Over that time the phpBB site was honed & tweaked into really something I can only describe as a thing of joy. A one stop shop for help,advice with all the calculators,recipes & bells & whistles that you could ever need.
You will notice I used the word was.
The forum grew too large for the original owners to manage & go to work/have lives/sleep/brew-delete as applicable.
Then one of them had an idea.
Why don't we find a professional web hosting company to run it for us?
Our community based forum was then sold to Group Builder-who in the space of 96 hours this week have utterly destroyed it.
No free speech,dissenters are banned. We had a few sponsors,but mostly the site was ad free-now its almost unrecognisable as a beer forum. We don't even have agreed TOS. Our PM system is down,our Group chat function is down,many many recipes have been lost. VBulletin-the new software to replace phpBB won't even recognise our regional punctuation eg the pound sign-so many more posts have been corrupted. We were kept in the dark about these changes until after the event. Even the new frontpage doesn't work. Austin-our contact person-has managed to duck away this weekend leaving no support staff to sort out any of the problems-leaving the UK mods & admins an impossible task. As such most of them have now resigned in disgust. Funnily enough their leaving posts have been deleted to cover up all signs of the havoc caused by this shyster outfit.
I fully expect to be kicked here as well, but would just like to take this opportunity to point out just how shabby Group Builder really are.
Kind regards, Jim from the UK
