Since it has come up a couple of times in this thread, I thought I'd talk about where the money to run Beyond3D comes from, who runs it, and my involvement in moderation and how the forums are practically managed on a day-to-day basis.
First, the money and who runs it. Beyond3D is technically paid for by my company (GPU Tools Ltd), is completely advertising-free, and doesn't take any corporate sponsorship of any kind. The primary income that my company uses to pay for things comes from forum users in the form of subscriptions and donations, so the costs are covered by those of you kind enough to chip in. That said, biggest financial contributor is actually me, as part of my covenant as Beyond3D's owner and admin to keep the lights on for you all. Without my personal contribution as a subscriber, the Beyond3D costs to my business mean it would operate at a loss. My business pays me nothing to run or maintain it.
As for who else runs it with me, it's actually just me in my spare time. I do everything to keep the site on the Internet, from platform maintenance (host and hypervisor + VMs) to the software infrastructure and keeping it patched and up-to-date and your data safe, to the backup system, DNS, and everything else. Basically anything between your browser and Beyond3D's servers is looked after by me and me alone, and I spend ~10-20 hours a month on it in my spare time (so for free), usually very early in my morning when it's quiet and least distruptive to you all posting.
As for moderation, the team take care of that with zero input from me since I joined AMD RTG. When I joined RTG and figured out what I'd be involved in and doing for them, I took the decision not to moderate the forums any more (bar approving new account signups that get caught in the filter sometimes, when I happen to login and there's one or two to look at). The team are
excellent at what they do, looking after things on your behalf without getting paid. They do it for free because they love the forums and the discussion, and they do it without any guidance from me in the last 20 months or so.
With that out of the way, here's my personal input to this thread's core topic — the difficulty of moderating polarised threads like those on PC raytracing — it's all covered by
the Terms of Service and Rules. If you haven't read them before, please do. I wrote them to be nice and simple and easy to understand, with one core message: just be nice to each other.
Technical discussion on topics you don't have all of the facts to hand on are fun and why we're all here, but they can be difficult and emotional and polarising and full of opinion. So, take a breath, remember that there's a human behind the others keyboards taking part in the discussion, and be nice to each other. Even if you think the other person is so dead wrong that you can't even understand their position. Take the time to try and understand any opposing point of view, and debate it.
Graphics should be fun to discuss, in all its forms.
Anyway, hope the above clears up any weird hint that there's a monetary aspect to anything going on here, or that money somehow drives moderation. There's none of that. If you do donate (thank you if you do!) it just makes it less expensive for me to run. But even if none of you donated or subscribed then I'd still pay for absolutely everything as per my promise to you all when I entered the industry, I'd still do the hours each month to keep things secure, fast and online, and I'd continue to stay out of the moderation decisions completely and leave that to Shifty and the team.
Oh, and my employers have had absolutely no say in what happens here, and have no behind the scenes access of
any kind. That was hopefully completely clear to everyone the whole time I've been employed in the industry (both at PowerVR and now at AMD), but just in case anyone wasn't clear.
I just don't care enough to make a big deal of it on the forums because it's unproductive being a troll to strangers and being cynical about just about every company. :V
