and here I was,,thinking all along,,you owned the site!!! hope that you are able to get a hold of him,,and get it going again...
HA! No, I don't own it. I'd LIKE to tho. That was, and could be again, a real nice site.
When you start an endeavor like these sites, you DO have a certain responsibility to the members/participants. Nothing legal I don't think, but certainly from an ethical and moral standpoint. And to just let a site go dormant with no explanations or notifications to the membership is irresponsible in my opinion. Now of course if he's ill/injured/dead, that's an entirely different story! But even with MY sites, I have backup people that can step in, in my absence. Whether or not they choose to keep the sites up is their decision, but if they do not, they have instructions to give fair warning to all involved and allow someone else to take them over if they so choose.
And just for the record, it's not all that expensive to run a site, even one the size of Arboristsite.com. I use the same software, (vBulletin), on my 2 sites, and after the initial expense of the software license, (around $300ea), the only real expense is the domain rent. If you buy and maintain your own servers, there's an expense there for sure, but nothing says you HAVE to. I am very happy with my hosting company and don't see a lot of difference between a hosted site and one that runs on the owners own servers.
Domain NAMES can get expensive if they're already taken, but if they're not, they can be as cheap as $20.00. I think I'm paying $85 a year for each of my sites for the domains and server space.
One of the sites I'm a
moderator on, (not an owner), has over 100,000 members and there's some time involved to moderate all those people, but we have 15 moderators who are more than adequate to approve new members, (about 50 a day), monitor threads for inappropriateness, and generally keep the peace. None of us are paid and are happy to serve the site, so that's not an expense at all. I hear a lot of site owners complaining of the expense to run a site, but aside from a time commitment, I don't see it.