Dear Rllmukforum
No-one cares about what you have to say. Remember when you were spamming peoples email addresses and begging them for charity handouts? No? Well, let me refresh your memory as I received the following email on 14.10.09.
It’s Graham_S from rllmukforum.com here. Please excuse the spam.
The owner of rllmukforum,com has decided that he’d like to step down from running the forum, and plans to switch the current server off at the end of November. We are forming a non-profit co-operative group, called the Rllmuk Supporters’ Club, to own and run the forum from now on.
We need you, and we need your money.
We’d like to invite you to become a Member of the Rllmuk Supporters’ Club. The subscription fee is £10 a year. This will entitle you to a package of benefits, and more importantly buy you one share in the Industrial & Provident Society which will make you a legal member of the club that will own the forum. Legal members will have the right to vote for a President and the Committee, and have a say in how the forum will be run.
In order for the subscription fees to cover running costs in the future, we also need donations to buy a server and to get us started. We need you to dig deep. I’d hope that to start things off many of you can find an additional £10 or £20 on top of your subscription. For the people who have good jobs and money to spare, £50 would help set us up really nicely. Give whatever you can. I’ll be nagging many of you personally for the money over the next few days. Send us your money! (Please!)
Xevious, our Treasurer, has the full details of how to join and donate
If you want to know more about what’s going on, look at the FAQ
We’ve been making good progress:
– We have a clear technical plan.
– We have a clear financial plan.
– The FSA and Co-operatives UK are looking on our application favourablyAll the volunteers are working really hard to secure the future of the forum.
Join us! Save the forum! Thank you!
Graham_S
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem in pledging my support to the “gaming community”. What I do however have a problem with though is the manner in which this community is run. Instead of being a forum that champions ideas and innovation, and allowing people to get their point across, Rllmukforum comes across as a forum that is rather more concerned with promoting egos, popularity contests, and whether (or not) someone is “cool”. I did voice my concerns about this when I received criticism (not the same as “critique”, you understand) for one of my “column” articles in September last year. It seemed that Rllmuk forumites were far more interested in being petty, and weren’t at all interested in supporting those who wanted to grow and better themselves.
I guess some things never change. Led by committee, Rllmukforum is run by the most “hateful, petty and altogether shit internet-dwellers I have ever had to experience”. Its no-name inhabitants congregating together so as to voice their opinions and have their group therapy sessions. In light of this, and considering Rllmukforum’s lack of productivity, £50 seems like an incredibly tall order. Why would I want to fund a bunch of nobodies who aren’t interested in intelligent gaming discussion?
Despite its reputation as being one of the more established forums on the internet, in this day and age, what exactly is Rllmukforum’s USP? With every other website increasing its repertoire of skills and services, and acting as a one-stop shop, why would anyone wish to care about what a bunch of no-name individuals on Rllmukforum have to say about the state of the industry? What makes Rllmukforum contemporary and relevant, and what unique content does it have at its disposal?
I can understand it if Rllmukforum is some “higher authority”, and is doing all these “cool” things – like winning awards, hosting events at Earls Court (like Eurogamer did last year), or having a magazine out in the shops that is currently being written by many of its more prestigious members, but from what I’m merely observing… and with all that manpower and resources at its disposal, Rllmukforum hasn’t done anything to legitimate itself in the eyes of the gaming industry. It’s so far behind other websites that it hasn’t even adopted many of the more exciting features currently being championed by leading community game websites (such as N4G and Gamervision). So to that extent, why would anyone care about what Rllmukforum has to say? What is Rllmukforum’s list of accomplishments?
That’s a simple question, and it shouldn’t be that hard for the 60,000 nobodies on that forum (with their 60,000 spam posts) to give a rather more complex answer.
Oh wait: they can’t. They’re all bullshitters with zero talent.