I didn’t say half of what I could have. If you’ve ever dealt with Terry you’d know what unnecessarily nasty is all about. As I said, most of the material on Tascamforums originated on other sites, namely homerecording.com… so much of my stuff was copied and pasted verbatim from other music forums I lost count. And they wanted to charge for what was freely available elsewhere. I was Tascamforums member #80 and one of the first moderators. I offered technical advice from 30+ years of recording experience for free, and then they turn around and charge a membership fee.
After I quit the forum my posts continued to be stolen from other sites without credit. Terry tried to pressure Tascam into funding the site. Tascam got so disgusted with their tactics they removed Tascam forums from their list of recommend music forums. Teac/Tascam also received complaints from forum members about mistreatment due to terry’s behavior. Many people thought they were on a Tascam company site, because up until 2003 Tascam did maintain a forum at Tascam.com. If you want to reach Tascam experts from the pre-2003 company forum most of us are at homerecording.com in the Tascam or Analog section. Thanks for the welcome.
P.S. RIP Bruce. He was ill for a long time and the problems with the site were not his doing.
Beck,
I don't know the exact scenarios that you may have faced with Terry and Tascam Forums, but I have to say that tascamforums was a HUGE resource for me too. HUGE! I got so much direct help there (especially from RedBus and some others) and I was more than happy to contribute my under $10 fee to help support the forum. I will forever be grateful that the forum existed. When I did internet searches, I always ended up at tascamforums. In fact, I had no idea that there was a Tascam forum over at homerecording.com (which I will gladly be involved with now).
There are always two sides of the story to every situation. From my perspective, the only thing I see wrong with what you have explained so far is the fact that text was copied from one forum to another with the idea that it was original text. While I agree that it would be completely wrong to do that, I would want to examine the evidence before drawing conclusions.
If this was the case, I could see tascamforums trying to be helpful by consolidating useful information to one forum. Although, they really should have stated the original sources.
I never saw anything wrong with the membership fee. It costs money to host a forum and I don't see anything wrong with asking people to contribute to help share the costs. I also wouldn't see it wrong for the owner of the forum to make money off of the forum if he was putting lots of his time and effort into developing the forum.
Regarding pressuring Tascam to help fund the forum. I'm 100% completely annoyed that Tascam wouldn't be wise enough to run their own forum. It is absolutely ridiculous that others would have to pick up the slack and support costs for a company and create a forum for them. Tascamforums probably saved Tascam 10's of $1000's of dollars in support costs. They kept me from calling in on their support lines and tying up their support staff with redundant questions. So why wouldn't it be reasonable for Tascam to pick up the slack?
I'm not trying to disagree with you here or discredit the fact that you may rightfully be disgusted with TascamForums, but I know I will have a harder time finding information I need about my DM3200 because TascamForums is out of commision. But like I said, I will gladly give homerecording.org a shot and I look forward to reading your posts. It sounds like you have done a ton to contribute to that forum.