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When I first started visiting BPL regularly (due to Ken constantly nagging me to visit it) I found it to be a pleasant place to visit.
There are not a lot of alternatives out there so I was glad to become a member at BPL. I did not want to use whiteblaze because they are so East Coast focused (and understandably so). I did not want to use hammockforums (well, actually I could not, they refuse to remove content from their website, even when issues legal Cease and Desist notifications, so rather than just doing the legal thing, they blocked my account - note: did not terminate/close/remove, just locked me out so their precious threads would not be 'messed up' - WTF? ). So that left me pretty much only mailing lists, for which I am eternally grateful such still exist (pct-l being one of the best hiking resources that exist).
So when I finally did decide to join BPL I took a good look at their differences between "member" and "life" and when I saw the list of features only two of them stood out for the MLIFE, those being "Access to lifetime Members-only forum" and "Backpacking Light's annual strategic planning meeting in Montana". I thought it could be nice to have access to an advanced level forum where those with decades of hiking experience hung out in (the MLIFE forum) and I thought that the ability to head up to Montana to hang out with other guys that really into hiking would be a great yearly event. So one day I asked Ken and _P about those two features and they both sort of laughed at the second one, saying that such meetings had never happened (again WTF? way to fail on that promised feature BPL) and that the MLIFE forum was nothing all that special, and worse, not very active.
So I had a decision, think about whether I would be here 5+ years later and pay for MLIFE or just pay year-to-year.
In the end the decision came down to the fact that I did not think BPL would be offering the same features 6 years later, so why take the risk.
Having been a here few years now I will likely eventually loose money, but morally, I think loosing money (and thereby BPL taking excessive money from me for failure of not provided features promised to its members) is the right thing to do. Yes, some day I will probably end up spending more, but for me, it just feels like the right thing to do. Additionally, should I eventually come to the full realization that BPL has no intentions of fulfilling its promises, I can always go to another such website should one come along, and than not feel like I was taken advantage of for a few years worth of subscription funds.
I make my living by creating and owning subscription based websites and software - and business is good enough that I can hike a 1000+ miles each year and not worry about finances. I fully understand what is involved in running a website like BPL (I own websites with tens of thousands of members) and I am a co-founder of the phpBB software, a forums software that has hundreds of millions of users within its forums. I have said it before and will continue to say it, the actual software/server/maintenance expenses of running a website the size of BPL is not a lot. If that alone is costing them over $300 per month than they are doing something horribly wrong. On the other hand IF the guys behind BPL are trying to fund their own lively hood (i.e.: their paychecks) from BPL than all of this becomes a whole other matter and their failure to provide SAID SERVICES is and should be the issue that Ken is making it out to be.
{removed about five paragraphs from right here that was taking this thread off-topic, which did not make Ken very happy - giggle}
BPL Terms of Service:
Backpacking Light reserves the right to remove for any reason posted materials from a chat/message board, and the right to deny in its sole discretion any user access to a chat/message board, without notice.
(edited post because it was taking this entire topic off-topic... sorry ken)
Edited by JohnAbela on 06/16/2012 21:27:30 MDT.
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