Ben Kinney is NOT a villain

Ben Kinney is NOT a villain.  

You can vilify him if you want..

There are many that are persecuting him when he's trying to help you.  Many of you may not agree with the following post.  I really don't care.  If you don't like it or the Rain or Ben himself, then leave, quit, delete your profile.  For all of you negative people that are on here, shut your mouth and be quiet.  You can catch a lot more bees with honey than vinegar.  I learned at an early age that if you have nothing nice to say...

We (Debe Maxwell and 25 others) had the pleasure of having him on our Zoom call yesterday going over what some of his plans are for Active Rain and what some of the issues are.  

When the website was purchased by Ben, nothing was as it was said to be.  Active Rain wasn't making money every month, in fact, it was losing money, but some of these things were hidden from him.  If you didn't know, the website is very complex and there are many facets to it. The main issue or problem is that the coding that was used to make this site was made with old code that had many issues on updating it, which he has been doing incrementally at significant cost.  Many sites are made with old code because that's the code that was used at that time, however, many of those sites could be updated as was needed, AR wasn't.

SEO is a big thing to many and it should be.  This is one of the many things that he and his team are working on and trying to fix.  There are many different components to Active Rain, many that you don't think of, but are there.  All of these things take money and lots of it.

I and others agree, that we wouldn't keep AR going at a cost estimated of losing $500,000 a year.  That's a half million dollars!  I like many of you, but come on, let's get serious for a minute.  I might like you, but not 1/2 million dollars a year just because you're nice.  Sorry.

Some of the things that Ben's thinking about are making AR separate from a more localized approach for many to get news, reviews and information.  Something I feel that's needed out there.  

Many of you are upset that a month's worth of posts and points have been lost.  OK, it sucks.  It's affected all of us, but he's been working on getting them back and he's got most of it.  Now, he's trying to get it integrated back into the Rain.  Personally speaking, you can't please all of the people all of the time.  I think that putting this lost information back is going to create a whole new set of problems and nastiness coming from some of you.  Hey, he's doing a lot of this out of the goodness of his heart.  I wouldn't the way many of you are acting.  OK, Ben hasn't been able to follow up on some of the promises he made at the beginning.  If I was losing that much money every year, I'd piss a few of you off and go about my life.

I have found him to be humble, transparent and thankful to know many of you.  Even his detractors have his understanding.  ???

The bottom line is that he has given us a place to go to and even though money has been offered to him by many of us to continue his efforts, he passed.  He said that he doesn't want to take our money until he knows that he can fix the site the way that it should be.  That's the kind of guy he is.  

I and others have different thoughts about that money issue.  Many of us would really like to help.

Ben has said to us that he wants to be more involved with us and update us monthly.  On this past call he shared with us some screenshots of what he may plan on doing with the site, though he's not positive yet.  On the future calls, he'll continue on having an agenda to go over with many of us.  He'll also be listening to some of our thoughts and ideas since we are the Users of the system.

As I said before, that's the kind of guy that he is.  He's a regular guy trying to help us out.  He doesn't have to, but wants to.  You may vilify him, but he's not a villain.