It’s been a long time since I last update this site. In the meantime the shenanigans at Team Noah have continued. If I can find the time I will document a few more of them , but I thought I would point out a couple for now.
1) Noah’s Owners Forum has been taken down
I guess the owners were getting too uppity. they were asking questions like “what does version 5.0 have in it? And “how much does it cost?” The Owner can’t stand for that, he would have sliced the forum off in a huff. He’s been aggressively pruning the open forum, he recently deleted a thread for someone just asking for a bit of community support. Judging by his comments, it would appear that the whole concept of Noah’s Classified as an application you can buy is under threat. I won’t reprint it here, he probably thinks that would be breach of copyright, but you can read it here until he takes that down as well!
2) The launch of Noahs Neighborhoods
Another US National release of Noah? Well actually no. The software underlying Noah’s Neighborhoods is nothing to do with Noah’s Classifieds at all. It’s built on SPBAS http://www.spbas.com/home which is kind of an enhanced toolkit for building web based software. If you take a look around their site the pricing model makes it quite attractive, you can get a 1000 user licence for less than $200. So if you are a PHP coder looking to build classified ad software to fit a client specification it sounds like a good choice. Maybe that’s why Noah’s chose it?
I think the whole “Noah’s Neighborhoods” thing is hysterical–the guy who OWNS Noah’s Classifieds has started his OWN Classifieds Portal with someone ELSE’S paid software? Because, once he actually started using Noah’s for EComm, he realized how crappy it really is, if you’re charging for ads? Brilliant. And of course he took down the Owner’s Forum, ’cause we don’t bow down to Steve and kiss his ass.
He thinks because he GAVE AWAY a zillion copies of the free Noah’s that it means it’s really bona fide “good” software. Big whoop. It was fine when people were downloading it for free, sticking it on their little community or gaming sites for their members and not charging–when it was an enhancement, not a revenue-driver. Now that people want to use it for actual MONEY, they’re finding out that all of Steve’s grandiose pronouncements are flatly untrue. Here’s the bottom line:
You CANNOT create an “ebay-type site” with Noah’s. You CANNOT have users automatically renew their ads and get PAID FOR IT. You CANNOT offer differing time periods for ads, so that you can upsell your users–not without significant manual intervention. Blank fields in the ads display, which is amateur hour stuff. Images all have to be uploaded at once, which bogs down user computers and servers. There’s not really an intuitive way for a user to review his/her ad before paying for it, and the payment mechanism isn’t that clear to users.
My opinion is simple: If Noah’s isn’t good enough for the OWNER to use for his own EComm Classifieds Portal, why the hell would anyone else use it??????????
Peanut