I’ve read a large number of posts in the last week about bullying. It’s not a subject I want to get involved in discussing because it has a whiff of bandwagon jumping and most online communities have issues with it when they’re in their infancy. Depressing really but something happened to me yesterday that restored my faith people a bit.
I do the site design and management for Mummy Reviews, a review aggregation site. It’s a hobby site that gives people a chance to plonk their reviews on a site that’s full of other reviews. Most of them are posted on the writers own blog first. We pay for the hosting and domain name (currently about £70 a year but likely to go up as the traffic is heading upwards all the time). It’s run as a hobby, not a business because I like fiddling around with CMS systems and making stuff. There’s not even any advertising on it at the moment.
Recently I updated the theme to a magazine layout. There were one or two issues with the formatting that seemed common to a lot of users judging by the authors support forum. In fact one commenter, Mr Natural posted exactly the same issue I had a couple of weeks past. There wasn’t a reply to his query but on a whim I clicked on the link to his site to have a look. Good job I did because the issue had been fixed!
I dropped him an email via his comments form and less than a few hours later I had a detailed thoughtful reply with a link to an updated theme for the site. This from a bloke who doesn’t know me from Adam, comes from a different continent, and was asked something by someone that had nothing to do with his website or his interests.
There are great people out there and I think its all too easy to dwell on the negative and ignore the good. Cheers Mr Natural :D