As anyone who read my last post knows, I’m working on a Beijing website at the moment. I’m attempting to build an area guide to make it easy for new arrivals to see what the main residential areas are and where they’re located in the city. This kind of information would have been great when I first arrived but I couldn’t find anything like it. So I guess I’ve got to build it myself! Yay!
To build this section of the site I need a list of the residential areas and I need to know where they are. I’ve been here for over a month but I’m still wandering around in a semi-permanent state of confusion. So I need some help. I made an initial post on Beijing’s main forum community, The Beijinger, and got some good suggestions for areas. Then, after having complied a list, I made a second post to the forum to see if my list seemed ok and if anyone had more suggestions for other areas I could add.
Well most people have been really helpful and full of suggestions, a couple have been arseholes, which can be expected on any forum, and one guy has suggested that I shouldn’t be using the forum for free information since I will be profiting from my website in the future. The guy is sort of a dick, but it got me wondering whether he has a point.
Is it fair to hit up internet forums for information that I will eventually be using to earn money from? Would it be better to make it clear from the start what my motives are and then go from there? I eventually listed exactly what I planned to do with the information since I’m not aiming to hide anything and I’ve only been met with interest and more suggestions.
I get free help all the time from sites like Digitalpoint and the Google Maps people but is it different when a forum is aimed at webmasters? Other people post events all the time to the Beijinger forum with an aim at making money, why should asking for help on a website be any different, especially when my site’s information will be free?
Is this guy just being a jerk, or does he have a point?
I’m curious to see the reaction when I make a post looking for paid writers. I bed there will be plenty of suspicious people rearing their heads. I’m not sure what it is about the crowd on these forums but they’re a testy bunch. The people on the London forums never gave me so much hassle!
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