Well, that's ugly. Greed laid bare to the masses.
I can't, however, believe it really comes as a much of a surprise to anyone. Who honestly believed, once you really think about it, that FFXIwiki was being provided to anyone out of the sheer goodness of the human heart? The moment they started begging for money, or ANY website gets the bright idea to put up that Paypal button, my alarm bells start to go off. It isn't the same for the rest of you?
Being confronted with the reality of things face to face might make the coldness of it seem a bit more harsh, but ... well, I used to make my living off of providing traffic to websites, some sort of like FFXIwiki. The fact that I know just how interested any person would become in providing a luxurious financial situation for themselves is exactly why I never "donate" to places like that.
Hosting costs are high, yes, but always exaggerated, and overflow form the "donations" are almost ALWAYS going to line the webmaster's pocket. What's more, in the worst of situations (like this one), the so-called "donations" aren't really needed at all. Ads more than pay for hosting ... the disinterested webmaster(s) are only after more, more, more.
Yes, it's two-faced ... but we all really knew how it was, for any huge-ass community website. Right?
The thing that makes this PARTICULARLY bad is the fact that a sheer minimum of work went into creating FFXIwiki as a resource. It's a wiki, so 99% of the content came from other people, donating their own time, experience, and research, and taking the time to put them to words. It's rather like setting up a building to be a library, letting all the townspeople come and donate a few books each, then turning around and demanding that they pay through the nose for "library admission."
If anything should ever be about striking a financial balance, and strive only to cover its own operational costs, it's a wiki. Unfortunately, as the more cynical among us might have already guessed, that just ain't the way it is. The moment Ganiman had the option to satisfactorily "sell out," he snapped at it, and was left trying to conveniently "disappear" the "keep us afloat" money he had just gotten done begging for. Meh.
This sort of thing is more rampant than most would believe. QCDN itself, for example, once provided some sort of monetary gain to Sculli, well beyond his hosting costs. This was brought up in the past, and there were those who resisted the idea ... Sculli himself, however, wisely remained silent about the exact amount he was pulling in. Rest assured, if it wasn't significantly MORE than it costed to keep the site going, he was desperately trying to get it to that point. Any who still fights against this idea is just being naive, at this point. If you don't believe it, do some digging for some posts he's made at a semi-popular "admin community." I can only assume the same is true for Reeve now. It must be ... he doesn't give two shits about us, and some short of sugar in his bank would be the ONLY reason for him to pay any sort of attention towards keeping us up at all.
About Taj -- he's done a lot for the FFXI player base, perhaps at least as much as any other person. As has been pointed out, however, he's got a massive ego. He'll jealously send anyone he views as competition for the spotlight toppling to the Earth. He could get in huuuuge trouble for the sort of vigilante "Internet wars" he's pulling, much as it does come across as a Robin Hood vs. Greed sort of story. The community does owe him for revealing the nasty truth of this situation, surely ... but for his own sake, I wish he'd stop just short of hacking into Paypal accounts. I'd like to keep him out of jail.
