@ShadowTheKidWizard @ShadowTheKidWizard In the end it had a single owner. Caputo sold to Ziff Davis Enterprises. ZDE sold it to an investment firm. The investment firm sold it to a single owner who only wanted one of the sub sites (SEO Chat).
He was buddies with the original founder for SEOC and wanted to revive it at the cost of all the other communties. I offered to buy them just to have the archived threads and membership lists.
I was going to rebuild each community on a new platform and attempt to migrate the users over. But he wouldn't go less than $10k and that was too much money for essentially a mailing list. With the shift to QnA sites like SE, it seemed like there was no real way to monetize it and I couldn't dish that kind of cash on a hobby site with no hope for getting any money back. But I did try.
@Nilpo I see, that's more than anyone else ever thought of doing. Jason took some people and created Developer Barn, which never really took off, so as expected just died slowly. I believe he spent more than 10k on it, overall, so pity he didn't just join you in your idea. :/
Last I checked, few years ago, the threads were still there, just in some readonly mode, so now all is gone forever?
@ShadowTheKidWizard That's crazy. Blast from the past. But even that FB page never got any traction unfortunately. Looks like the guy finally unloaded the domains though. Not that there's anything of note there. Back in the day, the defunct forums would have been archived as part of Dev Articles but I don't think this guy had any sense of wanting to preserve anything. When I spoke to him on the phone he seemed pretty well indifferent.
I was actually on Jason's site as well. It never really moved so I didn't spend much time there afterwhile. I didn't realize he had made that kind of investment in it.
I'm going to hit you up at your Gmail. If you don't use it anymore, let me know. @ShadowTheKidWizard
