First, let's cut through all this rhetoric and get to the facts. We can't have a discussion until people start getting the facts straight.
1. I did not accuse Overclocked ReMix of being for-profit. I never stated that the site made money.
Stop throwing around this statement because it is not true. Read the posts above, or E-Mail gigablah and he will confirm to you that I did not edit my posts to change what they said.
2. The first contact I had with Overclocked ReMix was not a "I'd love to help, and here's some suggestions" message. Instead, Liontamer locked the first thread I posted, basically telling me to go away. Although he did say that I could post another thread later, this is hardly a good start to a relationship. This action can be verified by reviewing the Overclocked ReMix forums from May 8.
3. I did not send form letters or copy spam to anyone. If anyone requests me to verify this, I'll post the 70 letters that I individually wrote and mailed to various artists and bands. Again, these are facts, not issues that are disputable.
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I'm tired of this E-Mails issue, because it's ridiculous. The bottom line is that you, zircon, didn't care enough to reply. You say that you don't have time to reply to E-Mails, but that's not true. How do I know that? Because you took the time to visit my Overclocked ReMix profile page. The boards display the last visitors to one's profile. How do you have time to visit my profile, but yet you're too busy to reply to a simple message? If you get too many messages, why post your E-Mail address on your website with directions to contact you? Saying that the message was spam is now ridiculous, because you knew who I was since you visited the profile page. You were on IRC frequently chatting and now you also suddenly have enough time to post messages here, as soon as controversy erupts over Overclocked ReMix. Why won't you simply acknowledge that some might see not replying to an E-Mail as rude? That's all I'm trying to get at here.
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Now, I acknowledge that drawing attention to Liontamer and djpretzel was out of the norm. I'll even go so far as to apologize for calling out Liontamer and djpretzel in public, but Liontamer needs to reciprocate by repudiating his false assertion that I believe Overclocked ReMix makes a profit, and djpretzel and Liontamer need to acknowledge that they could have handled the situation better by replying to one message, even if it was to say no. Remember, this was three or more messages over the course of several months that were definitely received. I think this is a fair trade.
I should also address the issue of suggestions. I've implemented around a hundred suggestions from community members. However, the problem with suggestions is that they often don't agree or there isn't enough information to figure out what to do. I appreciate all the suggestions that everyone has given, but there are some things that I can't fix without more involved help. Some people have said that they dislike the graphics used on the site; however, I don't know anything about graphic design. Even if I did, though, suggestions that "something needs to be changed" about the graphics aren't helpful enough to take action. I followed the suggestions by changing the colors back in July, and people said that the new colors were just as bad.
Sometimes, there are also conflicting suggestions, such as one person stating that a button should be located at the top while another person says that the button should be located at the bottom. More frequent, however, are one-off suggestions, where one person says that something would be helpful. If you look at
http://www.shoemakervillage.org/mantis, you'll see that there are hundreds of one-off suggestions. Where should I start with these suggestions? I realize that everyone is important, but it's hard to figure out whether what one person says would be useful would actually be useful to everyone. There isn't anyone who wants to work closely enough to really examine suggestions and second them for implementation, nor is there a high enough volume of suggestions so that certain suggestions are repeated over and over.
Finally, even if we had all the suggestions possible, they can only be implemented on Saturdays and Sundays because of the lack of assistance. This is why I find those who feel that "I'm not listening to suggestions" somewhat unreasonable. I'm willing to work really hard to fix suggestions, but people need to be very specific about how things should be fixed (the specific location of the button, or the color of the graphic), they need to understand that a cost-benefit analysis is performed in the face of limited time to prioritize suggestions, and, most importantly, they need to volunteer to take a more active role.
Muuurgh has already done this by organizing a compo to be held this month, but the bottom line is that people need to be willing to make a small commitment to assisting if they really want to see a non-profit site succeed. It's easy to say that the site is bad, but it will never get better unless someone or some people help out.