The state or country I am talking about is: UK
Morning/Afternoon/Evening all!
I am a mod on a forum set up several years by two lads from Belfast (Northern Ireland). Over the years it has grown and grown, and tonight we celebrated our 4000th member. Half a year after setup a third admin was taken on board, and a mod team was built (four of us).
On Saturday, one of the admins was handed a £1,500 offer for our website by a man claiming to be backed by an English Premiership footballer. Rather conservatively, this admin immediately demanded £3,000. This demand was accepted, the man flew up and handed this lad £3,000 in a brown paper envelope (seriously... £50 notes... no kidding) after he and his father (who works in business) had reviewed the contract.
The site was now sold. The domain has not yet been transferred, and all the files and database are still hosted with us. I've not seen the contract, so I can't tell you exactly what has been sold.
The other two admins were simply asked which of two offers seemed better - £3 a day for a banner, or selling the site outright. Little did they know, not only did their opinion not matter (they both preferred to keep ownership, i.e. plan 2) but the site was then sold without them being asked for a green light.
They were each handed £500 from the £3000.
Quite simply, this is outrageous. From the start, the root admin was one of the other two, and he still is. He has been the one who made all the code edits, all the skin installations, and so on. He has even hosted the site at his own costs, and received no income at all from the google adverts, which had been set up using the vendor admin's adsense account (it was only of the order of £25 anyways). The £500 would barely cover the cost of hosting since the site was set up.
To add insult to the affair, the vendor admin, despite having no technical know-how beyond the most basic of HTML skills (no PHP) was then offered a salary to remain admin of the site. His role, as far as we can gather, is to keep it ship-shape and make it profitable.
Finally, it is believed that the email addresses of our existing users are going to be regularly harvested by the new owner so he can send them information about his other websites (auction sites apparently).
So to sum up, here is the utter unfairness as far as I see it:
- the site was sold without the accord of the two other admins
- one of whom is root admin (member #1)
- the income was kept, for the most part, by the seller, with small fractions paid out to the others
- he is now paid a salary to continue his minimal input, despite his total lack of technical know-how
- his only financial input was to register the domain name
- another admin has been doing all the technical stuff and paying for hosting which last week exceeded 15gb's work of data transfer
- the forum's members are going to have their addresses divulged to the new owner so spam can be sent
- the total rush and secrecy in which sale talks were held (probably to maximise his cut) resulted in the site being sold way underprice (I believe £5000 would have been achievable)
Does anybody have any advice on how to proceed? This so called 'friend' has now turned his back on his two friends and on the entire community, flogged the site for dirt-cheap and is now staying incommunicado (he's on holiday in Andorra would you believe is!)
Morning/Afternoon/Evening all!
I am a mod on a forum set up several years by two lads from Belfast (Northern Ireland). Over the years it has grown and grown, and tonight we celebrated our 4000th member. Half a year after setup a third admin was taken on board, and a mod team was built (four of us).
On Saturday, one of the admins was handed a £1,500 offer for our website by a man claiming to be backed by an English Premiership footballer. Rather conservatively, this admin immediately demanded £3,000. This demand was accepted, the man flew up and handed this lad £3,000 in a brown paper envelope (seriously... £50 notes... no kidding) after he and his father (who works in business) had reviewed the contract.
The site was now sold. The domain has not yet been transferred, and all the files and database are still hosted with us. I've not seen the contract, so I can't tell you exactly what has been sold.
The other two admins were simply asked which of two offers seemed better - £3 a day for a banner, or selling the site outright. Little did they know, not only did their opinion not matter (they both preferred to keep ownership, i.e. plan 2) but the site was then sold without them being asked for a green light.
They were each handed £500 from the £3000.
Quite simply, this is outrageous. From the start, the root admin was one of the other two, and he still is. He has been the one who made all the code edits, all the skin installations, and so on. He has even hosted the site at his own costs, and received no income at all from the google adverts, which had been set up using the vendor admin's adsense account (it was only of the order of £25 anyways). The £500 would barely cover the cost of hosting since the site was set up.
To add insult to the affair, the vendor admin, despite having no technical know-how beyond the most basic of HTML skills (no PHP) was then offered a salary to remain admin of the site. His role, as far as we can gather, is to keep it ship-shape and make it profitable.
Finally, it is believed that the email addresses of our existing users are going to be regularly harvested by the new owner so he can send them information about his other websites (auction sites apparently).
So to sum up, here is the utter unfairness as far as I see it:
- the site was sold without the accord of the two other admins
- one of whom is root admin (member #1)
- the income was kept, for the most part, by the seller, with small fractions paid out to the others
- he is now paid a salary to continue his minimal input, despite his total lack of technical know-how
- his only financial input was to register the domain name
- another admin has been doing all the technical stuff and paying for hosting which last week exceeded 15gb's work of data transfer
- the forum's members are going to have their addresses divulged to the new owner so spam can be sent
- the total rush and secrecy in which sale talks were held (probably to maximise his cut) resulted in the site being sold way underprice (I believe £5000 would have been achievable)
Does anybody have any advice on how to proceed? This so called 'friend' has now turned his back on his two friends and on the entire community, flogged the site for dirt-cheap and is now staying incommunicado (he's on holiday in Andorra would you believe is!)
