Bruner Blog

Rob Taylor responded to my earlier posting about just what Enetations is up to with its new little comment utility.

Hi,

I will try and explain what we are doing…

First up we are not evil spammers using a cunning email gathering device, however now you mention it…. We have not and will not sell any information gathered to anyone. We ask for your email address so if we need to alert you to a change in code or something big we can - as not all users read the front page.

All the information posted in a comment is stored on our servers, so yes this is turning into a spam harvester’s wet dream. You’re even getting me scared now! We did implement a anti-spam device to try and make sure that email addresses are not picked up by translating email@address.com to email at address dot com. That is straying from the point, however that was the extent to our spam related thoughts ;). I must say my personal spam levels have increased with admin@enetation.co.uk also being ‘targeted’ by earthlink users with macro virus’s :S

Displaying a privacy policy that we will stick to is something I will look into very shortly. Likewise I will expand on exactly who we are, what we are doing and why and post it all on the enetation.co.uk site.We will write biographys, and possibley oblidge with the odd ‘me as a baby’ picture as well. The inital aim was to make a good working system, the next aim is to improve it (such as more transparancy in ‘us’) and secure the long term future of enetetion, without shifting too much from what is alread established. The reason it has not happened yet as it is only 2 weeks old

Briefly I will outline what/how we are doing enetation here. I (Rob Taylor) run Studio-51.co.uk, a company that does outsourced programming and techie friendly hosting in the UK. Due to this I have some surplus resources and bits of kit allowing me to host something as bandwidth hungry as enetation.co.uk. Likewise it means that in effect studio-51.co.uk is currently subsidising enetation.co.uk and will do for a while yet.

I have been astounded by the response by the community to enetation, which has prompted me to think a little earlier that I was expecting on enetation’s future. There will be a point where I will have to make enetation ‘pay for itself’, or at least not incur infinately expanding costs to run it, that is as your reader correctly points out its very 1999ish and hiding from reality if I just ignore the issue until its too late. Usually generating an income stream would be done via donations or some form of ‘Pro’ version for a subscription fee. However I hope to combat that by enabling users to ‘donate’ bandwidth and ‘load balancing’ the commenting system. I must state this is just an idea and an ideal at this moment, and it would be damn good if the community could ‘run’ its own commenting systems!

There are numerous problems with that, such as backups of comments, the system itself, integrity of donors etc. All problems that will have to be countered - or just accepted and revert back to one of the above sources of income.

So in all honesty we havn’t a clue, as we didnt expect it to be as popular as it is. We are not ignoring the fact at some point some poor sods going to have to give enetation something - however if they get more features, a big ‘thank you’ or whatever. I just cannot say.

This has gone on more than I expected, so much for ‘briefly’, but I hope it answers the readers question, even if the answer is ‘we dont know’.

Cheers, Rob

Many thanks for the reply. Keep up the great work!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 25th, 2002 at 2:08 pm and is filed under aa-home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.