Hello,
Noticed this thread, I have tried to join the London Lounge on several occasions simply because I wanted to contact a member about what they had written in a thread and I find it is impossible. On the register page it tells you if you have problems registering contact an adminstrator, there is no way of doing so have searched the whole site without finding one e-mail address.

Specifically I was trying to contact the member "Wakefield" concerning his experience with Leeds suit tailors and which one he could recommend, he wrote about in the following thread:

http://www.thelondonlounge.net/gl/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7143

If anyone knows how I could join thelondonlounge or could get in touch with the member Wakefield I would much appreciate it, my e-mail address is jntski@googlemail.com if you would like to get in touch, thanks!

Alden does not like people posting here, that is definitely true. He automatically assumes that the members here are trolls, hostile to his forum.

BTW I don't get paid to promote Dugdale, nor will I accept advertising money from anyone. I just want to make life easier for bespoke tailors, who often haven't heard of Dugdale outside of the UK because they are a small cottage firm without much of an advertising budget. It's very hard to sell a bespoke suit when you have to charge the prices demanded by other merchants. Customers turn tail and run.

Some people don't realise that the real strength of the internet is independence of information. That's what makes internet fora better than GQ magazine etc who are gagged by their commercial arrangements from saying much of value. If you sell your independence, that's it, you sell your real value as an internet forum. Of course, you could go the other way and be out and out commercial - fill your forum with banner ads, perhaps even pop up messages. I agree it is terrible when you masquerade as a source of totally independent information while collecting money to promote people or firms surreptitiously.

That said, Dugdale did give me a 10% discount on one order of cloth for myself. You could argue that everything needs to be declared above board or else it's corruption etc etc. Do I list every free lunch or tie I get from being a forum owner? So I do sympathise with fellow forum admins, because the moment some maker etc is discussed favourably, it does make a significant positive impact on sales. I sometimes wonder what I'd do if a large firm offered to pay me a large sum of money to promote them. How many people would say "no"? It takes a lot of resolve to do that.

It's an independence I also strive to maintain.

But it's hard sometimes. If you have a large forum with lots of traffic, you can need a dedicated server plus storage space and bandwidth. Someone has to pay for it. At the moment I can absorb the costs myself because I don't want to sell out, but sometimes I fear for what might happen if I am too successful...

Last edited by Sator (2010-02-11 16:35:50)