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Good and interesting points have been made. Tim, you mentioned a sharing environment and where to draw the line between teacher and student. You've been on both sides and so have others. And, there are those who are normally on just one side or the other most of the time because of where they are developmentally and there is room for each of these.
Tim and Marvin,
There are many issues:
1. Preserving the quality of the Forum in terms of membership. We simply won't allow members who are below a certain level of development because it's not aligned with the main site and we don't have enough manpower to handle the resultant critique requests.
2. Maintaining the technical aspects of the forum. This upgrade could well take a week, maybe more of my time.
3. Handling issues that come up on a regular basis...there's more.
If this were totally run by the members, like a co-op, that would free me up a lot. But, there's technical things that most would have difficulty with or not the time to handle.
The primary reason for starting the Forum was for the artists on my site, but it's evolved into something other than that. There are many more members that are not on my site.
And, with donations - will anyone come back in a year and make another one? Or just make one and be done with it?
Perhaps to those who have donated, a yearly email could be sent automatically. Perhaps it could be set up that one would be required to make a donation if they want to post for critiques since that's probably the most active area.
More than a magazine, perhaps this is more like a coop. Take the example of a natural foods coop because we used to have one I frequented. And, a coop has to pay rental space and has to pay the electric, the heat, etc. A refrigerator repair man has to be paid. But, everyone contributes to the coop in some way. Paying a membership fee is rather like paying the electric, the heat, etc. it seems.
So, I'm not even thinking about closing this down, but if it became such a financial (time) drain on me that I was at that point, what then.
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