Call, Rumours, the EBT-Tool, Wap and more...

[Petri6]

The code and design? Texts? A mess, lawyers would be happy

Luckily we also have a few of them in our memberbase. Too bad that I don't have my degree yet.

[zillionaire]

I second Mr Euro not to enter fake bills at .com. Instead, I would enter real bills at .com as well with this link in the comment field:

http://forum.eurobilltracker.eu/viewtopic.php?t=10438

This is more decent, and in case you get a hit at .com, you may have spread the word a little more.

Well, I tried it. After pressing "OK" I received the message "Banned word"

What were you saying about being decent?

[Petri6]

I think that we shouldn't enter any bills on .com and demonstrate to Giro how we feel about making the site commercial.

[yoto]

People, I dont agree with your hesitations, really! We're all comunicating in the .eu's forum, can't you see? We belong to this community.

Well said.

I'd say we should keep entering the bills to .eu, as normal. not to mess with .com with fake bills, fake hits, etc.
Eventually the situation hopefully calms down.
I will act as the .eu site was the original one.

[BogPoet]

Hello everyone. It's been a long time (or "hi, I'm BogPoet" if you've never seen me before - although you might have wondered who's that guy listed as a .pt moderator who you've never seen on the forum before).

It's a bit strange to be back and I'm sad I did it under these circumstances, but it's so enraging to see what happened to this beautiful community in the last few days. Since I last logged on, more than a year ago, I came back to this forum maybe once or twice - whenever I had PMs. The last one I got broke my heart. It basically warned me about the situation. I read this whole topic and it's hard to know what to say. But I'll give it a shot.

About two years ago, I spent most of my free time around this site. I was (and for some reason, I still am) moderator in the Portuguese forum. I entered coordinates. I answered support mails and changed bill data. I translated (I estimate that there was a point when about 80-90% of the .pt version of the site was translated by me). I gave a lot to this site. The site gave a lot more back. A fun hobby and a little corner on the web where I felt like home. A community made of people who weren't all wise guys cracking jokes at each other like 99% of the Internet forums out there, but intelligent people capable of intelligent discussions, where things were said and done in a constructive way. I loved all of that and if I stopped tracking and coming to the forum, trust me, it had nothing to do with EBT or the people who make EBT happen.

And today, I learn there was a split. My first reaction was, "What? How can this be happening?" and then I read this topic, I read the different points made by the different parts and I reached a conclusion: if i hadn't stopped tracking then, i would have stopped now.

Why? Because I think nobody's right.

Let me say, first of all, that I don't agree with Giro's idea of turning EBT into a money-making scheme. It's not that I object to the idea of putting adverts on EBT or raising some money, but all of it should be given back to EBT - paying server costs and the like. EBT is, after all, a collaborative site, as Giro put it himself, with "user-generated content". The fact is that I don't see why should Giro or anyone else profit from this user-generated content. How about setting up a site with interesting content generated by *you* and profit off of that?
And since we are talking about server costs, I'd like to know, by the way, what would have happened if avij hadn't been paying for the server out of his own pocket all this time. Anyone remember the old EBT hosting - in a shared server which regularly ran out of space? What would have happened if Nerzhul and avij hadn't kept the site going all this time? A webmaster that's mostly inactive (not only from webmastering but from registering bills as well) and who turns up from time to time is not the most ideal webmaster. Did he just woke up last year and noticed how big EBT was growing? Giro, if you're reading this, ask yourself if it's because of you. You know it's not.

That's not to say, of course, that Giro should be cut out from the scene. He did create the site, he had the idea (and yes, thinking "I'm gonna make an European Where's George?" counts as an idea), there wouldn't even *be* an EBT if it wasn't for Giro. And that's why I think nobody's right. "Greedy businessman"? One of the former "administrators"? No. He was the founder of the site. At least, give him credit for that. That sort of rethoric leads nowhere in the long run. As for promoting .eu in the .com site, I find it a bit overboard. Yes, overboard (although calling it "defacing" is just plain ridiculous). First of all, the guidelines (in both sites - they're the same) specifically forbid email addresses or URLs in usernames so, if you change your nick to reference .eu, it's a legimitate ban. As for note comments, we are now talking about a competing site. avij, Nerzhul, could you please tell us what would you do if you saw a reference to a competing bill tracking site on a comment? I can more or less guess. And just to finish, is it true that you locked Giro out of the decision making process concerning the site, as he claims?

What I'd like is to see a compromise, somwhere down the road where all of you find a common place to sit and talk a bit about things. It will be hard to find the middle ground, sure. I don't doubt it. But I'd hate to see a split EBT, I'd hate to see two sites using the name (created by Giro, as well, but owned in a small part by everyone of us, I guess) which I always viewed as a good place.
As Craco and some others said, I don't believe in black and white. EBT owes a lot to all of you. It's just so sad to see this state of affairs. I feel angry and although I left, as said before, it had nothing to do with anything inside EBT - and I'd like so much to see my old EBT back.

All of this is just my opinion, mind. I do not claim to be the owner of the absolute truth and I am perfectly aware that I am ignorable (for a lot of people reading this, I'm probably as distant as Giro, if not even more). It just happens that EBT still holds a special place in my heart, even if I'm no longer an active member of the community. I actually cracked a smile when I logged in to my account (in .eu) and I had a message telling me there's constants in Babel to translate (and I could actually access the Babel account! ).

Peace,
BogPoet

[Phaseolus]

well spoken Bogpoet.

I share this viewpoint.

[Dakkus]

The matter is money ?
Giro wants add for is own profit ? or only for keeping EBT alive ?
all EBTusers want answers

Well.. The money for keeping EBT alive has been coming from Avij. If Avij says he doesn't need that money, then what would be the problem? EBT has had no money problems that should be corrected!
Therefore, keeping EBT alive cannot be the reason.

And then we've got only one possible reason left...

[Dakkus]

well spoken Bogpoet.

I share this viewpoint.

An easy viewpoint to share it is. And for what I know, also Avij and Nerzhul share it. And possibly also Giro.

I just wish that could somehow lead into something...

[Yippo]

This is a very sad situation. Someone wanted to see open communication between avij, Nerzhul and Giro. Other party is communicationg, but Giro refuses (as I've heard) to have any communication in forums. Only thing he's telling is in .com and there's not "the whole truth"... Sad, very sad. I hope the will be a EBT in the future.

[Chiel]

If we all decide to chip in and buy the domain off Giro, how much would that cost?
The database and the idea of EBT will still be Giro's property anyway.
I think we should just leave .com and continue playing at .eu. I wouldn't be too worried about new users not finding the right EBT. An address containing .eu looks far more inviting than one containing .com, I'd say.

Oh and to all the people who are angry about being banned: advertising url's wasn't allowed at EBT and never will be, so what else did you expect? This situation doesn't make it legitimate all of a sudden. Same goes for the people entering fake notes and hits. It's not like that is going to make Giro think in a different way, let alone a more positive way.
By doing this you may be disqualifying yourself in a worse way than Giro has done.

Although I think both sides might have a point, I'm throwing in with Avij and Nerzhul for now. It would be nice to see Giro on these forums and learn more about his point of view though.

[snakefire77]

it's quite obvious that the way things are today, that EBT will just die out and leave behind a glimpse of what it was up untill now. Creating the .eu site, was actually killing EBT, because it's whole strenght lies in the fact that it's alone...when you have more than one site to track bills you just loose part of the magic and with it you loose most of the people.

Maybe it wasn't the nicest thing of Giro to move the site, but he still is and will always be the founder and as such he has the right to do so. And looking at the actions (creating .eu, spamming all the users with a one sided email to get them to dump .com for .eu) and the comments here on the forum, I can't help but notice that Giro's statement about Avij and Nerzhul has some truth about it. Avij and Nerzhul do act as if they own EBT. And ok they made some very important contributions to EBT, but they did it freely, nobody forced them to do it...as such they have no claim what so ever on EBT. If they didn't like the management, they just should have quit.
Everybody knows that when you do voluntary work for someone that you are totaly dependent on the good will of that person to recognize and award you for it, you have no rights unless he gives it and the other way around he can't complain when the work you did was not to his satisfaction.

And maybe it was a mistake from Giro to handle the issue in this way, but that didn't have to be followed by an even bigger mistake by Avij and Nerzhul. It is one thing to have a disagreement, it's whole other thing when you drag the whole community into it : which is exactly what Avij and Nerzhul did by creating the .eu and sending the email.

For me, I will continue to fill in my bills on the .com site for now...although as a lot of people out there I'm seriously considering quiting EBT all together if this continues.

[Kleman]

The matter is money ?
Giro wants add for is own profit ? or only for keeping EBT alive ?
all EBTusers want answers

Well.. The money for keeping EBT alive has been coming from Avij. If Avij says he doesn't need that money, then what would be the problem? EBT has had no money problems that should be corrected!
Therefore, keeping EBT alive cannot be the reason.

And then we've got only one possible reason left...

okay thanks

[Economist]

I totally agree with you, snakefire. It was not Giro who hijacked the site. It was his to decision to make to move it to a new server, and so he did.

Also, I keep on reading we do not want it commercialized? Why not?

A lot of other website, which like EBT solely live from user content, are commercial. Take Facebook, MySpace and so forth. What' wrong with that?

The only reason there weren't banners on the site from the very first day in 2002 was that some (or one) person(s) decided to cover the full costs by themselves. Nobody would have complained about a banner back then, why make a fuss about it now?

Furthermore, thinking about that now, the situation until Christmas Eve wasn't a sustainable long-term strategy in the first place. And neither is the EBT.eu site now. What happens (and this point has been made in this forum earlier) if Nerzhul or Avij gets himself run over by truck? Or loses his job and can't cover the costs of 200 Euro per month anymore. Of course, I hope that won't happen, but if it does, EBT got some serious problems.

A commercial website appears to be a much more sustainable long-term strategy, at least compared to what we have today.

Having said all that, only one of the sites should and will survive, and if Giro doesn't employ some lawyers, it's going to be the EBT.eu site. Thanks to the great communication and Giro's absence from any debate, most members seem convinced this is the place to enter notes. (Furthermore, I think Giro probably won't be able to administer and manage the site on his own.) And as communities like EBT only make sense with a big community, I will stay with whoever wins. I only hope that one of the webpages will disappear, one way or another, as soon as possible, as two EBTs really is the last thing anyone needs.

[wisi]

Even if giro employes lawayers, what is part on EBT and what have others contributed? If you extend it to the translators, forum moderators and of course the two other's webmasters, then Giro's share will be for sure below 10%! Thus: He will not win a law suite either, and this would surely break his finacial neck due to the distribution into different national laws.

[vinc17]

It was not Giro who hijacked the site. It was his to decision to make to move it to a new server, and so he did.

Also, I keep on reading we do not want it commercialized? Why not?

Though Giro owns the .com domain, he does not own the whole contents (unless every contributor transfered their property, but I doubt this is the case). And if I understand correctly, Giro wasn't very active these days. Making significant changes such as moving the website to a new server or making it commercial should have first been discussed between all the contributors.

A lot of other website, which like EBT solely live from user content, are commercial. Take Facebook, MySpace and so forth. What' wrong with that?

I personally don't like some kind of intrusive adverts. And voluntary contributors may dislike the site becoming commercial. These are reasons why this should have been discussed.

Or loses his job and can't cover the costs of 200 Euro per month anymore.

Banners could be added in such an emergency case (temporarily or not). But this would be done to cover the costs of the website (hosting, etc.), not to earn money.

A commercial website appears to be a much more sustainable long-term strategy, at least compared to what we have today.

This can be a solution, but not the only one. And currently, there's no emergency to change.

Having said all that, only one of the sites should and will survive, and if Giro doesn't employ some lawyers, it's going to be the EBT.eu site.

I think that if Giro employs lawyers, none of the sites will survive.