Answering some questions that have been raised.

First, I don't know why some companies approached me asking if they could host their forums here. As I mentioned, this was some time ago and I have no idea if any of them would still be interested since most have probably established their own forums by now. Perhaps their interest was just a way to avoid having to spend time/money on establishing their own forum--something that's already a sunk cost for them at this point.

As for the reason why I've been thinking of this lately, it's as I mentioned: I think it could provide for a larger centralize community which would inevitably lead to more people with more knowledge being in the mix. For example, I don't visit any other 8052-related forums at all so those forums don't benefit from whatever I could contribute; likewise, there are certainly people that visit other forums that don't visit 8052.com so 8052.com misses out on their potential positive contributions.

I also often see links here to threads being posted on other forums. That means if someone reads about it here and wants to participate there, they have to open up yet another account to participate in that forum. Vice versa when people at other forums get referred to 8052.com.

As for editorial control, the company would have control over their forums--though they could certainly have the option of having existing moderators also moderate their forums.

Regarding the look and feel, I think that's something that would have to be resolved. The biggest benefit would be users not having to create and maintain lots of accounts to participate in multiple forums, and being able to quickly search all those forums, and having the option of all those forums being included in the nightly mailing list. I think there'd be a certain aesthetic benefit in there being look & feel consistency across the forums--it just makes the transition from one to the other easier. But that'd probably be between 8052.com and the company. Clearly the company wouldn't want 8052.com publicity on their forums and that's something that would have to be addressed.

I'm not too concerned about additional forums generating too much traffic. Since the traffic would be separated in other forums, those that aren't interested in that traffic just wouldn't open those forums and wouldn't notice any difference.

As for economic benefit to the site, that's rather nebulous at this point. It's not clear that there would be any.

Regards,
Craig Steiner
8052.com Webmaster