Guess who is copying dp? webmaster-talk.com! just got this in an email: * We Now Share Ad Revenue! Yes, you heard that right. Participate on our webmaster forums we will share our Google Adsense with you (both the thread starter and the last replier)! Visit our News and Announcements forum for details. No Minimum post count is required to participate. New thread starters get 50% of the impressions! Can't blame them tho, digital point is one of the best webmaster forums around, so others are going to copy it...
Is it really all that surprising? Isn't every forum just a copy of another forum just like it? You have to compete and if competing means stealing ideas... then great.. Wal Mart didn't create the super store, Meijer did... but Wal Mart sure as hell took it to another level. It's all about advancement of concepts and ideas... if only one company worked the DVD player, we'd have sub par DVD players, same is true with forums... we need this healthy competition to enhance virtually everything... I'm sure DP has done some idea and concept stealing of their own... because I know they weren't the first webmaster forum.
NamePros does it too. Plenty of sites do it, it's not unique to DP nor has it been for quite a while. DP was the first and still does it the best -- a whole 29 cents yesterday! -- but none the less, others have been doing it for a while now. There are custom plugins for it over at vB.org
What ever................when a Joomla fan makes a mod specifically for the DP co-op I'm impressed. This place rocks big time. I want to know everything about everything and this is the only forum I'm a member of...............say no more.
There's a lot of internal stuff that can't (easily) be copied because people don't know what it is. For example this forum currently is running on 80 plug-ins. Some so major things (like revenue sharing), but a lot of them are minor tweaks here and there that most people would never notice. For example this forum doesn't have 3 entry points to the forum index like every other vBulletin forum has... Most vB forums have links to the following (depending on where the link came from): http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ http://forums.digitalpoint.com/index.php http://forums.digitalpoint.com/index.php? So stupid if you ask me... so there's a plug-in to fix that for example.
Dittoa although I wouldnt use the word "stealing." I just noticed this thread. Like a couple others have mentioned, revenue share has been around a long time now and is publically available on vB.org although we use our own custimized code. In the next couple days we are also going to be adding the latest Blog Posts link to our threads. Again, this is now publically available and we customized this one as well. We also use many other plugins and even some unique features. There is nothing wrong what-so-ever with us using a publically available script. And unfortunatley, most "ideas" can't be copyrighted. DigitalPoint is a great forum and Shawn has developed many great tools etc. and I commend him for being the first to put in to effect the adsense revenue sharing idea (that I am aware of at least).