Open Letter

[FineWolf]

A COPY HAS ALSO BEEN SENT TO KEVIN BY EMAIL.


Hello Mr. Michaluk,

As you may know, many high profile members of the CrackBerry community have been deserting the site for the past few months due to strict forum guidelines. Most of these members were developers, theme builders and independent bloggers. The reason why there is such desertion right now is due to the outrageously strict guidelines currently in place in the forums regarding to outside-CB material. The policies currently in place are in my opinion non-sustainable and will cause CrackBerry to lose more of its crucial visitor base.

The following are three excerpts from the Posting Rules & Guidelines which I will refer to in this email.

Excerpt #1

No Advertising Policy
CrackBerry.com maintains a No Advertising policy in the forums. Individuals/Businesses may not make posts promoting the sale of their own or other competing stores Products (Accessories, Services, Software, Themes, etc.) or sales. Traffic Leaching is strictly prohibited. If you'd like to promote or advertise your Accessories, Services, Software, Themes etc. on CrackBerry.com please contact Kevin Michaluk directly. Kevin can be reached via email, kevin at crackberry.com.

Individuals looking to Sell or Swap personally owned items (i.e. Used Unlocked AT&T BlackBerry 8700 for Sale) may post in the Buy & Sell forum.

Please note, if individuals (not related to the company selling a product or service) post on an item that is or becomes available in the ShopCrackBerry.com store, if available for the same price or less we reserve the right to update posts to this link (gotta keep in business!).

Excerpt #2

Avatars, User Names, Signatures, General Posting Guidelines
[...]

Signatures are allowed, and may contain up to one external hyperlink (points to a webpage outside of CrackBerry.com), but should not be excessive in length nor contain any promotional text (enticing users to click). Traffic leaching will not be tolerated. Additional signature links are acceptable, so long as they point to pages within the CrackBerry.com site (favorite how to article, forum rules, etc.). Signatures should be small and tasteful and take up 1 - 4 lines max (including spaces) in the default font size (size 2 - nothing larger will be acceptable) (the last thing we want is to look at a forum thread and see 15 big signatures that take up all of the screen real estate). Signatures may also not contain any donation links or similar links. Moderators will determine what is acceptable or not.

[...]

Excerpt #3

The themes listed in this forum must be free themes for the community, or premium themes already listed in our CrackBerry store. For free themes, direct download links (either OTA or Desktop) must be provided and may not link to external sites. No themes may be offered for sale from your personal site through these forums, as it violates the No Advertising Policy of our Terms of Service. If you would like to sell you theme through Crackberry.com, please take the steps to sign up as a developing partner via MobiHand, Inc. - Services For Software Developers and you may choose to have it listed the ShopCrackberry.com store. Please read this post on how to register with Mobihand to offer your products on ShopCrackberry.com: List your Free and Paid Apps in the CrackBerry App Stores!

While I do understand the need for a community to keep it's visitor base, that particular policy has been pushed too hard in the past few months. The current No Advertising Policy (Excerpt #1) is currently too strict as it prevents those legitimate postings:

• Threads informing about BlackBerry related information/news not available on CrackBerry but posted on a competing community.
• Threads created by a app/theme developer to inform CB's userbase about a product they just launched but not available on CrackBerry's store front.

The second point particularly irritates me as I am a developer myself. While Mobihand's storefront is great, its uneven royalty scheme makes it a terrible choice for independent developers. When your product is bought on the official Mobihand store front, you receive 80% (same as AppWorld) and Mobihand receives 20%. But, if your product is both on a custom store front (say CB's store), you receive 60%, Mobihand receives 20% and the store front owner receives 20%. This makes it extremely hard for a developer to decide on a pricing range. For apps that are worth a lot (say 5$ and above), this isn't really a problem. But for apps/themes to be profitable on the Mobihand's store, most developers must boost their prices so that get the amount they need. Which means that what a developer might wanted to charge 1.00$ for, he is now stuck charging 2.50$ because of the unpredictable royalty scheme. For small developers, it is usually more cost effective to simply handle payments via PayPal. The problem is that CrackBerry doesn't allow that. Unfortunately, this would be a win/win for the community and developers. The community would get a wider range of products at lower prices, the developers would have a place to place such products with comforting loyalties AND CrackBerry would be getting a higher user base and more ad impressions.

Unfortunately, right now the current policies makes great developers run away. Theme developer rorschack listed two themes on the BlackBerry Themes subforums. He posted a "PayPal Donate" button in order to process payment. He was then asked to remove his PayPal link, register to Mobihand's Content Developer Program, and post the said theme to the Mobihand's store front (according to Excerpt #3). Problem is that to stay profitable, he would have to bump the price from 2.99$ to 7.50$. But doing so would cut his sales in half and make it not profitable to release the said theme. In this case, the CrackBerry community lost the possibility of getting this theme, and lost a great theme developer all because of a case of corporate greed. It's even against that policy to simply state that an application is available on BlackBerry AppWorld if it isn't in CrackBerry's store front.

Fact is, CrackBerry's revenues would not diminish if the No Advertising Policy (Excerpt #1) would change according to the following recommendations:

• Only prohibit:
  • Threads or posts created only in the purpose to advertise a competing BlackBerry community.
  • Threads or posts created only in the purpose to advertise a competing store front.
  • Threads or posts created in the purpose to advertise a product and posting a link to a competing store front while the product in question is available in CrackBerry's store front, excluding carrier store fronts and RIM store fronts.
• Therefore, the following are allowed:
  • Threads or posts created in order to bring attention to a BlackBerry related article not available on CrackBerry.
  • Threads or posts created in order to bring attention to a product not available on CrackBerry's store front.
  • Links to a product in another store not available on CrackBerry's store front.

These changes would allow the community to have access to a greater range of products and information sources and would attract more members, which in turn would increase ad impressions on the site.

Therefore, that clause (Excerpt #3) from the Theme Posting Guidelines would not be required anymore.

Signature Guidelines about external hyperlinks (Excerpt #2) should also be modified to allow external links as long as they comply with the revised No Advertising Policy.

I hope that my email will not be in vain and this current situation will be resolved soon as the talent exodus from CrackBerry right now feels like it might just kill the community.

[Kevin Michaluk]

Hey FineWolf,

Thanks for the message. Just in Orlando right now doing up our Smartphone Round Robin, so don't have the time to respond at the moment to the fullest extent possible. Early next week I'll respond to this in detail.

Definitely understand all the points you have raised in your email, and do have explanations as to why things are the way they are and how they evolved to that way. Put it this way - there is ALWAYS a reason for everything, and it's pretty much always a good one even though others may not initially see/understand that from their position. We don't haphazardly set out to do things to make things difficult on anyone. Back at the Developer Conference a few weeks ago I had this same sort of conversation on the topics you have brought up with MANY developers, and each walked away from that conversation understanding and appreciating CB's role and position and better understanding how to fully market their apps and themes in the entire BlackBerry ecosystem.

What I have been planning to do, and will use this msg of yours as a catalyst to get this done asap, is put together a guide for app/theme developers outlining everything in detail - I think members, customers and developers who read this will have a better appreciation of CrackBerry and the great things we have done and are doing for the space. Coming from DevCon, I did talk to developers who definitely had a misunderstanding on things, as on a daily basis they are only seeing one side of a story that has many sides to it. We'll get this cleared up.

On a final note for now, when it comes to policies/decisions/etc. I always go for the logical route that makes the most sense. So if there are changes to be made that make more sense then the way things are, then I'm all for it. I'm always about the win - win - win and what's best for CrackBerry and the BlackBerry space as a whole.

Thanks for the note. Be in touch soon,

Kevin

[FineWolf]

Thanks for the prompt reply Kevin, I'm eagerly awaiting your answer and hopefully some future changes.

[Kevin Michaluk]

Hey FineWolf,

Still working on the developer and advertiser handbook pages I want to get up, but key thing is that in reading again through your points above, I think we're on the same page.

Will get those pages done and do some re-writing to our forum policies to make them a little less scary sounding (and less long to read!). I think some of the verbage there evidently isn't as clear as it needs to be based on where my thoughts are at, which is more along the lines of where your thoughts are at is well.

My goal is to always make CB a happy, friendly, open community forum that benefits BlackBerry users and the ecosystem as a whole, and our rules are there to reflect that, not hinder it.

Think you'll be happy with things!

[FineWolf]

Thanks for the update Kevin. I'm glad to hear that!

[FineWolf]

Any updates?

[FineWolf]

I guess we won't hear from this again...

[pkcable]

Still in the works! The site is VERY busy right now and the holidays, but have no fear Kevin IS still working on revamping the rules.

[branta]

Originally Posted by FineWolf

I guess we won't hear from this again...

You can be pretty sure it won't get changed 2 days before Christmas!

[Kevin Michaluk]

patience finewolf!! geeez. Rome wasn't built in a day. I hear it took at least three.

working on this... along with a bunch of other stuff that i have to tackle. and changing things up like this take a lot of careful thought. and holidays are here. hopefully will have everything in place in the next week or two so we're starting off 2010 with good form.

thanks for the patience.

[howarmat]

thanks Kevin for the update!

[Aug0211]

Yup, watching this, excited to see the revised, more open, better policies!

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[Blacklatino]

Interesting letter. Looking forward to the response as well. Until then, happy holidays to all.

[Kevin Michaluk]

Just a quick update... thick in the middle of a BUNCH of stuff in regards to this and other things. Pretty pumped for CB in 2010. Think everybody will be very pleased... members, developers, etc. Hoping to roll it out before i leave for CES next week. fingers crossed. worst case we should have this all set for the week after ces. thx for the patience... but just so u know i'm really working on this stuff. gonna be good!

[Aug0211]

Thanks for the update Kevin! It's a busy time for all - so we definitely understand. Hopefully, you're able to enjoy the holidays and you're not TOTALLY pouring yourself into this Although, I won't lie, I'm very anxious to see the changes!