In rememberance of Avatar Forums

[Disco Scratch]

Originally Posted by Eltu

Tree of Souls was formed in early 2010 as a result of AF being taken in a direction that a few of us were not in agreement with.

It's unfortunate there was somewhat of a fraction of the community at that point, and both the ToS and AF administration certainly did their/our share of overreacting at some things, but nonetheless at this point things have calmed down

The split between the sites that resulted in separate factions is one of the reasons why I was never active over here on ToS. Simply being from AF almost got me banned the first few times I posted because there was a lot of spy / troll paranoia on both sites. I signed up for AF June 30th, 2010 after the split. I didn't learn about ToS until a few months later and that's when I signed up on August 9th, 2010. Like I said, I never really became active on ToS because the paranoia regrettably created a unfriendly environment. I'm glad that's gone. I'm not saying the members here were bad or anything it's just that when I first came to ToS it was right after a very rough patch and how could anyone know if I was a real fan / new member or a spy / troll? I mean, the exact translation of my username is basically Eternal = Constant / Enigma = Problem. That just sounds like a troll. lol

To clear that up... I went with Eternal Enigma because to me it represents how things have always been in my life. Most people I ever interact with misunderstand what I mean because I have a bad habit of not explaining things clearly because I rely on the other person to be intelligent enough to decipher what I said and it has gotten me into some trouble in my personal life. So I went with Eternal Enigma to mean Always Misunderstood, which sounds less like a troll and more like a outcast in this context.

As it stands in its current state AF is not a viable option for AVATAR fans. You can become a writer for Avatar Forums... What does that even mean? I'm not sure I truly understand the direction Lon is trying to take the site in. I guess he's changing it from being a fan discussion forum to a AVATAR blog / news site. They already have an official site for that plus social media. I follow the official AVATAR page on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

At this point even if AF comes back like it was I would no longer be an active member and that's final. In my mind AF is gone. Once I realized that AF was simply an investment that was supposed to be some kind of cash cow that never took off and now the investor is sour about an investment gone wrong; it really turned me against being part of it.

To clarify... I don't mind an owner of a site making money off the site they own, but I am against it if that's the only purpose. An investor simply will not run a fan site the same way a fan would because of the different motivations.

Buying a fan site with the intent to funnel money from the members into your own pockets or sell the site for more than it's worth is a very corporate RDA move and I can't in good conscience be a part of that. There could have been some money in it too. Just 100 members donating $10 per month could have generated $10,000 per year if you kept the operational costs at around $150 per month. That's not including if you had some revenue from advertisements.

If you invested in the right site at the right time decent money could be made on the side. If you were bringing in exactly $10,000 per year in profit and if the site remained popular all the way to this point Lon could have had an $80,000 return on a site he purchased for peanuts. I believe that's what his intent was. To cash in on the next big thing and it didn't work out. It didn't work out for a number of reasons. Poor choices on the administrative side and the initial wave of fans losing interest over time, which left only the most dedicated fans. If they leave it's over. Suddenly taking the site down in an effort to scare up a buyer isn't such a good idea if it means losing the rest of the members who were loyal to the site.

Not to make myself sound important, but I tried to keep things going on AF by making threads I thought would provide interesting discussions. They weren't related to AVATAR and they were controversial, but I was even getting ToS members who hadn't been active on AF for years to actually login to participate in my threads and we had at least 30 active members each day. Once the debate section was closed down I went away to play Planetside 2.

I checked in on the forum and noticed that after the debate section was closed the numbers of consistently active members went down. You can only talk about how beautiful Neytiri is for so long. After 7 or 8 years with no new content you've got to let your members talk about other things. Literally the only activity on AF the past three years was like five of us posting photos of Neytiri and talking about the weather.

(I have nothing against talking about the weather).

(I certainly have nothing against posting pictures of Neytiri).



I think that we should start moving some of the popular topics from AF to ToS. I know that many of you were active in the gardening / greenhouse thread that was only a few months old before AF went down. We can have those discussions here.

TrueLoveforNeytiri - I'm looking at you.

There's no need to lurk!

Also I'll add this...

AvatarForums.com is a premium domain. It is up for sale for $2,795.00.

Avatar-Forums.com is NOT a premium domain, which reduces the value by a lot actually.

To provide some contrast...

NeytiriForums.com and Neytiri-Forums.com (non-premium) is for sale for $0.99. You could also purchase Neytiri-Forums.net, Neytiri-Forums.org and Neytiri-Forums.info for $17 combined.

Lon's 5k price tag is a gross overestimation of value. To be fair though since the old AF had gigs of content I believe it could / should be sold for $250 on the low end to $1,500 on the high end. If I was going to purchase AF I'd offer $750 and would negotiate to no higher than $800.

Those are my thoughts, opinions and views on the matter. I may have just highlighted just how little I know about how this all works, but that's my point of view based on what I do know. I'm not bashing Lon I just disagree with how he runs the site.

Goodbye AF
I've found my new home on the internet.