how does fudiabetes manage to be run without corporate sponsorship?
Pretty easy really. We use all volunteer staff, and the technical infrastructure can be pretty easily covered with a few small donations. While we will likely fundraise at some point in the future, corporate sponsorship isn’t required to keep an online community operating. Good question by the way!
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the reason i ask is because a diabetes site whose name shall remain unspoken says it requires corporate partners to exist. i think it compromises the quality of that site, and could lead to possible conflicts of interests if members were to post comments that would lead to possible loss of revenue for the corporate sponsors.? i am very grateful to the people who started this site. ps when talking about entities who possess a team of highly educated corporate lawyers, it is always useful to speak in the hypothetical using the subjunctive tense and question marks.
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Please direct your gratitude to @Michel, he was the one that is the driving force behind this site. The rest of us are just his minions. Most of us agree completely with you, and feel that the site that shall remain nameless suffers from lack of transparency as well as issues surrounding sponsorship. We hope to be able to operate without either of these two issues effecting us. In my opinion the transparency issues are worse than the corporate sponsorship issues, however they have recently spammed me as well, which I am not super excited about. Glad you have found us. We hope to build a really open community where everyone’s opinions can be presented and represented!
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If you run short of funds that would be exclusively dedicate to hosting fees, please mention such.
I have no problems with donations if I actually know where the funds are going to be used.
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Any site or business that is beholden to it’s sponsors will never be able to exist in the nature that they wish to exist in. We decided when this site started that we we would self fund for this very reason. Up to this point, @Michel has covered full costs for what has been accomplished to date. The plan is to eventually start up a donation link where we, the members who benefit daily, can help maintain the costs associated with the site. Everyone has such busy schedules that it’s coming along more slowly than we may like, but this isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon for us. The most important thing is done and working nicely (the forums). We have all either lived, or will be living with Diabetes for many years and we know, respect and benefit from each others knowledge. When you begin accepting sponsorships, you subsequently lose a little of your own direction and vision.
We like not being beholden to anyone here at FUD. People are free to express their opinions, post links to other sites (without them being deleted) or hold any views that they want (even if they aren’t the Admins/mods views…I know :gasp:)
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Glad you are here. Please spread the word about us.
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thanks michel when you see this!!!and i was at the site that shall go unnamed when things came to a head. so also thanks to sam and rose!!!
no more worries about 
sorry, site that will go unnamed 
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Oh, and we don’t have any lawyers on retainer. We do have a dentist however…so read into that what you will.
i’m not a lawyer, but some of my best friends are yale educated corporate lawyers 
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We’re trying to keep the riff raff OUT of this site, though.
Joking!!!
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i posted to tudiabetes sincerely wanting to know where people go on the web to get info on diabetes. i mentioned i go to tudiabetes, jenny ruhl’s site and facebook page, diabetes daily, and fudiabetes. so far i have gotten 2 likes and no comments. the post hasn’t been removed which is good.
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Be prepared…they remove all mention of FUDiabetes. We’ve seen this over and over and over and over again. It’s quite a shame actually. Any site should promote any other site so that people can improve their lives. TuD can be mentioned here by others because they do have valuable contributors who have the same goal we have – to help others manage diabetes and live fulfilling lives despite the disease. Unfortunately, the “head shed” over there …or part of it, have it out for FUD for whatever reason. They feel challenged I guess…
I don’t know how they sleep at night.
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We have a very simple funding arrangement here so far. Michel pays the bills and we surprise him with fancy bottles of wine occasionally. I suspect as we keep growing we might grow beyond that at some point in future.
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The reality is no one site provides everything. Different sites have different users and different content. The world simply doesn’t work (for the most part) where one solution satisfies everybody.
The content and users on the FUD site are quite a bit different from the TUD even through there may be overlap. They simply are not the same. I am a big fan of free choice.
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Be advised the tud admin here do lurk around on this site… none of them are members. In reading between the lines I’ve inferred that that keep track of who joins here…
You know, in keeping with their core value of transparency.
You should mention in your new thread what you like about each of the sites you use…
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They’ve already complimented Jenny’s forum…
Yeah - the thread is going really well. Kudos to @vprediabetic for getting a good thread going on that topic. Not easy to do !!! (In some places - lol)
i posted this at tudiabetes:
i think if we learn something important from another site, even if it’s not come up naturally here, we should definitely post about it at tudiabetes with the right tags and in the right forum section so that the collective knowledge/experience can more widely be shared. for example, i posted over at FUdiabetes, but i would also like to mention here, that i had what seemed like a ministroke after upping my intake of aleve to deal with hotflashes. since then i’ve found that aleve has been associated with an increased incidence of stroke. this is something important that i believe should be shared across sites. https://forum.**fudiabetes.**org/t/for-diabetics-8-heart-tests-that-can-save-your-life/390/93
that post was not taken down and a moderator Gary even thanked me for the link, which was to FUdiabetes. i feel like everyone here does- we need to share important info. at least 3 mods at tudiabetes seem to agree. i hope more people from tudiabetes will also come to this site so we can expand our knowledge base.
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