Do you like to keep this forum alive?

In two months, the domain tel.community will expire.
At the moment I'm reconsidering if I want to continue my investment in .tel.

Due to the negative feedback about .tel and no expectation of improvment for the environment for .tel, I want to ask the community if this forum is still needed.

If not, I will close this website in June 2017.

@tel.community - This Forum is Most Definitely Needed !

I hope you won't close it - it is the ONLY ACTIVE .TEL FORUM AFAIK - without a place for us to exchange ideas and information my feeling is that this would lead to the early demise of the .TEL gTLD which so many of us have invested a massive amount of time and money with over the years !

I hope you have a few good .TELs registered so that if we can get the word out following the 13 March .TEL liberalisation you will personally benefit.

As always the BIG PROBLEM IS TELNIC'S LACK OF PRO-ACTIVE MARKETING but as I have said before it looks like they have NO MONEY LEFT and VIRTUALLY NO STAFF !

.TEL needs taking over by a major internet company such as AFILIAS - they were interested once - I hope they will be again when Telnic's coffers finally run dry !

I am going to hang in there - I really hope you decide to do so as well !

http://MikeSeaton.tel

Ref: https://companycheck.co.uk/company/03555437/TELNIC-LIMITED/financials

tel.community wrote:In two months, the domain tel.community will expire.

If the matter is only about domain tel_community, then, perhaps, you can return to domain teltalk_org - as for me, it was better because it was easier to remember (imho) and is cheaper for renewals. Also, ORG is an old reputable TLD - not one of the new TLD - so it is reliable for a long run.

Thank you for the first two responeses.

Almost all .tel recources from the past have been closed without any prior announcement. Meanwhile, almost all websites created in or after 2009 that have been dedicated to .tel have been disappeared over the years.

I don't want to close this forum like many .tel services from one day to another like we have observed it so many times, but I feel a little bit like I'm providing a stage to the world without audience.
I see only two remaining main players in the .tel world: Mike and Mark
The last has ceased to express himself since a few years. Meanwhile, he prefers to work in the background.

Most other people have given up .tel since long.

Furthermore, after the allowance of web hosting for. tel last month, it has become clear that no awareness for .tel could be generated.

At this point, I have to make a decision:
Do I want to continue supporting a technology that has never been recorgniced outside of a small group of enthusiasts?
If I will do this, I have to spend time and energy for a long drought time in the vague hope that one day a big change to the positive will happen.

Please give me more feedback, so that I can evaluate if my effort for .tel is still worthwile.

To answer your question, you have to check the current state of .tel:
Objectively considered, .tel is nothing more than an ordinary gTLD out of about 1,500.
In addition, now it offers an one-page template impossible to use for a professional business.
You have to define the value of the term 'tel' after the dot in comparison to the other 1,500 gTLDs.
Is .tel better than them? > Then stay tuned.
Does the term 'tel' has no advantage over most gTLDs? > Then don't waste any further time with it.
Based on this, you have to make the decision yourself.

Please search for a person who is willing to take the forum over.

At least, the forum won't disappear in this case.

When are you guys going to realize that .tel was a scam from day one? The poured money into marketing to get it off the ground and then left it high and dry. They never intended it to be successful. Get over it and move on. Take your losses and move on.

Interesting to note that this forum has now a higher Alexa ranking than Telnic.org. That must tell you all you need to know :-).

@tel.community,

How much does this site cost to run? I wouldn't know how to run it but am probably prepared to pay my share.

As to your investment in .tel, it is what it always was - it ain't what you've got, it's how you use it (I have no idea what you do have). I don't see any undeveloped domain as having anything other than face value these days. The .com boom occurred because there was only .com and, interestingly, even hotel.com is only used as a forwarder for hotels.com.

TelBlogger wrote:When are you guys going to realize that .tel was a scam from day one? The poured money into marketing to get it off the ground and then left it high and dry. They never intended it to be successful.

I personally think in the same way. With that refinement that these guys did their little monkey business as best they could, but they were not able to understood that they had a jewel in their hands, from which dealing honestly they could extract much more than from the simple scam they were dealing with.

My recommendation:

Drop you .tels and continue tel.community instead.

tel.community wrote:If I will do this, I have to spend time and energy for a long drought time in the vague hope that one day a big change to the positive will happen.

I think that with this forum you can do the same thing what some desert plants do during drought: do not close it completely but let forum hibernate till the better times will come.

I mean leave forum be available for reading and temporary close it for writing new comments. And write about that on the front page.

In such way you will have peace of mind and if one nice day something will change to the best, you will be able to make forum be alive again.

As for expiring domain, I would return former Teltalk_org (as you may know, I categorically am not a fan of newTLDs : )) - if that would not cost very much.

Also, I would make there few links to existing TEL-threads at other forums where forum members could communicate during times of this "drought".

Here, for example, two links to TEL-forum and TEL-thread of Russian-speakers (by the way, they also became very silent after Telnic had cancelled subdomains):
1. ForumDotTel.ru
2. DomenForum.net

4444 wrote:My recommendation:

Drop you .tels and continue tel.community instead.

Thank you very much for your answers to my question.

I like the suggestion from the member '4444' the best.
I guess I will do exactly that.

I like the domain name tel.community.
Since I have no intention to use it for different reasons, I will give my commitment to the community now:

tel.community won't be closed and this forum will stay alive.
You can be sure that this platform for .tel won't disappear, even if .tel won't gain momentum.
I will keep this forum online as long .tel is an active domain extension.

Thank you for participating!

Even though Ive only been here about 20 seconds I'd like to see the forum stay alive.
I've been guilty of lurking for a fair while, I was prompted to register as a member just so I could vote in the affirmative. 
Good to see some of the old blood still hanging in.

Hello @Tel.community 

Thank you for changing your mind to keep the forum going, i have one of the fastest servers if you want i can provide you free hosting for sure as well as pm me the renewal of the domain if it's in my budget i will pay it as donation to keep the forum going if it's cheap i might help you with the renewal of it for multiple years.

we all are here because of .tel and we should not be divided i guess everyone likes a bit of .tel even thought we don't agree with everything .tel does 

i have been busy trying to figure out a way that .tel can work and we have come to conclusion my sites are running great and we are cutting our cost almost by US$ 5/yr that should be good news for everyone to support everyone but before we do anything it is still free of cost to test try and www.developing.me 

sites made out of it.

www.fishing.tel ( Type in google : vip fishing trips in seychelles ) i know it might not be a common term but being on top on this keyword on google with just one domain hardly any info is great.

www.SpareParts.tel ( Sub Domains : www.Zimbabwe.SpareParts.tel www.Zambia.SpareParts.tel )

:) 

Thanks for taking time to look into it

Thank you very much for your very kind offer, shahid1!

The domain tel.community costs $30 yearly.

As you surely have noticed, advertisement is displayed on this forum. This is placed by the hosting provider.
To disable this ads, the hosting provider is charging $20 yearly.

Since I don't earn anything with this forum, I haven't disabled these ads.

I would be happy about any kind of support, e.g. about a donation:



You will find this button on the start page of tel.community, too.

Dear Tel.community 

it is a pleasure that i could assist, have already sent you Euro 30 for the renewal of the domain
as for the hosting it is free of cost including ( CloudFlare ) you will not regret it. let me know
when your ready and we will host you.

again if you have time message me in person i can see what i can do to find a better solution for this forum so it does not affect you and if it takes off it helps everyone including me :) 

Thanks

Shahid

Thank you very much, shahid1. You are very generous!

I have received your donation in gratitude.

If I would like to transfer this forum to CloudFlare, I have to transmit all forum content to a new software.
It would be a high workload doing this with 4,500 existing threads and over 17,000 user comments.

Whatever we decide in the future, I will make sure that this forum will continue.

All suggestions from the community to improve this forum are welcome.

tel.community wrote:Thank you very much, shahid1. You are very generous!

I have received your donation in gratitude.

If I would like to transfer this forum to CloudFlare, I have to transmit all forum content to a new software.
It would be a high workload doing this with 4,500 existing threads and over 17,000 user comments.

Whatever we decide in the future, I will make sure that this forum will continue.

All suggestions from the community to improve this forum are welcome.

Hello @Tel.Community 

No problem it is a pleasure :) 

i don't think much is needed, basically the domain is hosted with us and you get a cloudflare account which can also be updated for you free of cost by server admin and your set to go but i might be wrong but as far as i know not much content is needed to change it is the page rules you set in cloudflare.

have a good day ahead and keep the forum going

Developing.me is around the corner we are just trying to perfect it before we deliver it

@shahid1

The problem with switching to another hosting service is that this forum software AND the hosting is provided by the forum service provider.

If I switch to another hosting service, I can't continue using the current forum software anymore.
I would have to rebuild the forum completely new again.

But thank you for your suggestion.
You are an enrichment to the tel.community!

Excellent outlook that this forum will keep the history of .tel including the content from the previous community forum:

http://www.tel.community/c11-telnic-s-official-forum-closed-on-14th-january-2015

tel.community wrote:@shahid1

The problem with switching to another hosting service is that this forum software AND the hosting is provided by the forum service provider.

If I switch to another hosting service, I can't continue using the current forum software anymore.
I would have to rebuild the forum completely new again.

But thank you for your suggestion.
You are an enrichment to the tel.community!

Thank you for your kind words in reality it is you who has kept something going on even though many don't like it or hardly care about it but I appreciate the efforts your are putting into it  and will do my best to stand beside it to support in anyway I can, yes then it is a totally different scenario but never the less whatever happens hope we all benefit from it in long run.. 

Good Luck

Just to let you know, today I have renewed the domain tel.community for the next twelve months.

At the same time, I have enabled automatic renewal for this domain, because I have promised to keep this forum alive.

Please be aware that I have dropped completely all remaining .tel domains I bought in previous years, because I don't believe in a future of .tel anymore.
Consequently, for the future I don't have any interest in .tel at all.

Anyhow, I will maintain this forum properly.

For me it seems to be worth to keep all the content since 2009 online, since a lot of knowledge and experience have been collected during all these years.
This includes the complete content of the first Telnic forum: Telnic's official forum (closed on 14th January 2015)
It can be used as a bad role model for other domain extensions for not making the same mistakes as Telnic / Telnames.

I wish all the best for those people who have decided continuing the support of .tel by staying engaged!

tel.community wrote:I wish all the best for those people who have decided continuing the support of .tel by staying engaged!

Thank you! I share your skepticism, but it seems that .tel is getting stuck with about 100,000 .tel domains:

http://www.tel.community/t842p125-the-daily-tel-statistics#17460

I'm wondering what kind of registrations are these, since most .tel domains have no content at all.

MWX wrote:I'm wondering what kind of registrations are these, since most .tel domains have no content at all.

Could it be that fake registrations are keeping .tel domains on this level?

4444 wrote:Could it be that fake registrations are keeping .tel domains on this level?

Interesting thought. That could be the reason why nowadays Telnames tries to prevent the publication of .tel statistics.