Future of the Bazaar?

[Cubs]

It'll be fine. Northstar are not going to wring their hands at people doing a little trading of second-half stuff, I'll stake my wife's reputation on it. In fact they have been known to actively promote other (rival) ranges themselves if they think it's a nice product. It's a friendly little hobby most of the time.

[Harry Faversham]

I'vehad some great stuff from the Bazaar over the years, I've also had some great stuff from Northstar too!

[FionaWhite]

... I'll stake my wife's reputation on it.

A fine upstanding gentleman... 

But on topic yeah, I too doubt that our new emperor Nick will do anything to the bazaar.

[nicknorthstar]

I'm not going to do anything with the Bazaar. Last thing on my mind. Unless the members are unhappy with the board?

We let a Frostgrave Trading Post Facebook page run alongside the Frostgrave Facebook page, similar thing, that has loads of other peoples products on it.

Cheers
Nick

[ork56]

Northstar 'taking over' is no bad thing as support is always needed to keep forums running, so I'm cool with that. It would be an improvement to have a specific Northstar heading in the Bazaar section, so long as all the others remain the same? The only one that may worry would be the commercial one?

[robh]

....... The only one that may worry would be the commercial one?.....

I agree, currently LAF is "funded" by Alex with some support from those members who have contributed. But I am pretty sure the money to keep it up and running is mostly  Alex's.
That will likely continue when Northstar take over and they will be putting up the money, time and effort for us to be here. So we will be in a situation where rival products/suppliers are being advertised and sold on a forum paid for and maintained by Northstar.

I do not see an issue with the "boot sale" type ads but commercially I think the position will need to be considered.
Does the forum need to become self funding to remain totally independent? (paid for by users, Google ads or some combination thereof), do other commercial concerns who want to promote goods/services here have to pay a levy? or something else?

As soon as people or businesses start being required to pay for something it will impact on what is seen as acceptable discussion here. If I were a manufacturer I would not be happy paying to post product promotions here only to face a wave of negative and disparaging comments (even in the tone with which such criticism is generally found here).

I don't think this is a simple "no change" handover.

[FramFramson]

Well, Nick has already stated his intention to restore adverts to the site, which, fair enough. One assumes those will cut Northstar's costs.

Also a forum doesn't really have a high overhead in terms of cost. It's usually more the time spent fixing occasional backend issues, chasing away spambots, etc.

[nicknorthstar]

My reply to Robh's thoughts are North Star is not just a manufacturer. If you look down the left hand side of the North Star website you can see all the companies we have a relationship with. http://northstarfigures.com/

The figures we make are just one part of the picture. We spend most of our time distributing wargames products to retailers around the world, products from all those manufacturers listed on the site. And more. Perry Miniatures are one of our suppliers, but you can't mail order them from us. If you've ever bought a Perry Miniatures plastic box from a game shop, there's a good chance we supplied it. And there are companies we don't stock but we supply stuff to. We've lots of positive relationships through the hobby.

That's why keeping the hobby as a whole healthy and alive is important to North Star.

One big part of the hobby we have nothing to do with is our large neighbour down the road, GW. Once upon a time we were GW's distributor for Warhammer Historical, after it was dropped we had no dealings with them. But I don't want to cut out conversation about GW products. I'm more concerned they'll tell us what we can and can't say about them.

I can't promise LAF will stay the same forever, but right now our objective is to keep the forum as it is on a new server with the updated software.