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Old Jan 22, 2010, 07:39 AM
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Secret Squirrel Secret Squirrel is offline
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Join Date: May 2007
Location: Cleveland, OH
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Starting a site and building a community from scratch is always a challenging task. It is even more difficult when there are other similar more established sites to which you are compared.

I do have a couple of specific pieces of advice, which technically I should give in private, but they've already been mentioned in the thread.

You really have to be careful about how you handle the charity stuff. While it's admirable that you are willing to donate this money to charity, and while you weren't going to profit monetarily from the campaign, remixSite stood to gain by the increase in traffic and the number of submissions, and any ensuing publicity. (This outcome was also the same goal of the remix competition.) Most of us here are pretty cynical, and will see this as an attempt to gain something from the recent tragedy. I know that big companies do this all the time, and yes they are gaining something of value in the process, and yes that is the primary reason they do it. If it weren't the case, they would just take the proper action and donate in private.

I don't really know that it's fair to publicly call out OCR staff as being unprofessional. They've been fairly busy working on their site, and issues that are peripheral to the main goal often slip. I know that I'm guilty of just that, and I'm quite behind on responding to inquires from a number of people including the OCR folks. Moreover, doesn't remixSite essentially compete with OCR for a portion of the same community? I think it's important to keep your expectations realistic concerning just how much you'd be able to work together.

Anyway, I think there's a lot of good advice in this thread. It would be a shame to see remixSite shut down, and there is probably a niche that you can fill successfully, or something that you can do to differentiate from other similar efforts.