Serious: Is TabletPCReview about to go dark?!!!!

To all my friends and colleagues for nearly 10 years - and that includes you, @dstrauss and you, @Bronsky - , see the quote below (I have not linked the actual quote, the thread or the authors due to their requests) and know that the company that hosts TPCR has ceased editorial updates to the home page of the Forum and, per a Mod who knows, may at any moment shut the whole thing down!

I, for one, would be really saddened if this forum went away. I get more than a little enjoyment from my friends for years on this forum - most of which I wouldn't even know how to contact if TPCR went dark - and I would love to join with others in trying to do what we could to implore Tech Target not to shut it down and, if they are losing money on hosting - which is easy to believe because it is the quality, not quantity of members and visitors to this site that make it great, but would make it hard to make any money through advertising. I, for one, would be willing to pay a significant membership fee to retain privileges to use TPCR and there may be other approaches - what are we if not a superb idea-generating team?!! - so I hope as many as possible will weigh in here and that those who have more clout or connection than I do might be willing to contact our "corporate parent" in hopes of securing this awesome community.

Jeff Bellin (jeffdbellin@gmail.com), aka, "lovelaptops"

Here is the quote, the latter one being from a Mod.

<<...does anyone know why there hasn't been anything posted on TabletPCReview's home page since December?..>>

Since you've brought it up, I regret to report that TechTarget halted all editorial work on TechnologyGuide sites as of Dec. 22, 2017. The forums... for example this forum... will remain open, at least for the foreseeable future. Obviously, this situation could change without much, or any, prior notice.[/QUOTE]

 

This is incredibly distressing news. Ad blockers built in to browsers have made it nearly impossible to earn money from advertising.

I haven't posted anything on my site this year and I have fallen way behind on my tablet pc news gathering, but I always assumed that even if I shut SPA down entirely I would be able to rely on the TabletPCReview community to keep me up to date.

 

......!!!!...................................

 

You are definitely one of the people I think of when I think of the richness of knowledge and exposure to the "genre" of technology we represent. I would like to be among the organizers of a response (keeping in mind what we are responding-to is a mod's confidential response to a question from a new member about the home page being out of date) to Tech Target to get ahead of any precipitous action they might take. I have no idea how much it would cost to host this site, but given the limited traffic and how cheap the storage of our archives would likely be, the question is whether Tech Target would be looking to sell the intellectual property of the site (brand name, URL, archivers, member list) and, if so, would the prospective buyer shut it down and just mine the piece parts or would it be folded into another forum. A second issue we face with concern only about this URL and it's content and membership is that Tech Target owns a constellation of sites - including NotebookReview.com and several others - and it may be that this site, though it would add relatively few monthly page views, somehow fattens the appearance of the value of the package of all the TT sites they might be looking to sell.

Anyway, I am battling rheumatoid arthritis, which I was recently diagnosed with, so my energy and initiative capacity is limited at this time. But we have, I think, enough critical mass of people who, though very busy professionally and personally, could contribute ideas and contacts in a way that we may be able to fulfill the prime objective - keep the site up and running - with incremental contributions of knowledge, contacts, ideas, perhaps not requiring a great deal of time investment, which I fear most of the true partisans simply don't have the bandwidth for. Here are some random thoughts I have as to things that can/should be done by any and all who can contribute:

1) Spread awareness quickly - We need to make sure this thread is quickly seen by as many partisans of TPCR as possible. What is the best way to insure that the "right" people see this thread quickly?

2) Whoever knows Mods and other members who have management links @tpcr/Tech Target should contact them and solicit information - so we're not running on rumors - and ultimately can make contact with TT at the appropriate level, indicating that the membership of this Forum are unusually devoted and potentially willing and able to pool resources to either purchase the IP and/or pay membership fees to support hosting costs. Put more succinctly: We need to start a dialogue with Tech Target as soon as possible, first gathering necessary facts and recruiting those with contacts and credibility.

3) A Poll should be launched asap. Questions that come immediately to mind:

a) How would you rate the value you place on TPCR?

b) How much would you be willing to pay, in membership or similar fees, to keep TPCR up and running, if it would be necessary to avoid shutting it down?

c) [having described the basics of our situation as we know it today] What ideas do you have for ways we might "save" TPCR? Do you have contacts/willingness to leverage your knowledge/contacts towards any potential approaches to keeping the site up and running? (Clearly, some of this requires that people respond, perhaps via PMs, to someone who will catalog and follow up on qualitative responses; I'm just throwing out the stuff that comes of the top of my increasingly addled mind!)

5) Reach out to owners of other forums, blogs, Youtube channels - who knows whom? - who might be interested in acquiring/hosting us. Should be done after initial results from step 2), above.

4) Help me out, community! I'm trying to get this ball rolling, but admitting that I am not "the guy" to get all of this done, or even think of all that could be done. Please jump in!

@Kumabjorn , @stormi @Azzart , @dellaster ,@nnthemperor , @JoeS , @DRTigerlilly , @Mesosphere , @MobileTechReview - spread the word to others!!!!

 

Perhaps we should make /r/tabletpcreview over on reddit?

 

Wow.

That's unexpected.

My personal interest is in the forum side.

How much and what kind of rack space does this specific forum require? How clean is it at present? (Meaning, how self-managing is the code base, or is it held together with a bunch of old hacks?)

That is.., how much day to day work is required to keep it floating in its current form?

 

Good questions. How do we find this out?

 

Ouch, this is the second internet related bad news I read today.
In this case though, I guess we would need to have some official statement regarding the technical side of things from the admin(s) to make any move.

Aside from the people of this forum that make my days lighter, there's an enormous amount of historical knowledge that would be lost if this place ever disappeared.

 

"...the people of this forum that make my days lighter..." This, is what means the most to me!

Well, I'm looking to pre-empt the "official statement" you refer to because I've long ago learned that if you wait for others with entirely different objectives to make decisions that will have impact upon you, it will be too late and their decisions may work out unfavorably to your interests. Here, our interests are simple: keep the forum, the community, and the rich historical data accessible to all. I don't care if they sell the URL and membership lists, just let us maintain the user community access and all the legacy stuff, which in the era of "big data," can't be a significant amount to store and maintain, it being 95% text.

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****Forget the "lovelaptops verbal garbage, this is what matters:

Thus, we need one, or a select few "connected" and knowledgeable forum members to speak up, contact their contacts, and tell us rank-and-filers what we need to do, individually and collectively, to help keep this thing from slipping away from us. Thank you.

 

Just out of curiousity, how navigable are the forum posts from archive.org?