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Frankly, I'm worried. The BOI has truly been a resource that has helped me. I make a lot of purchases of new stock online, and the BOI is the only place to go to avoid scams. It's helped me avoid several! If the BOI goes, the scammers will come crawling out of the woodwork immediately. Purchasing animals online from any but the best-known established breeders will become a serious gamble.
I've only been breeding for about 2 years now, and I'm still establishing my name and reputation. Without the BOI, it's going to be much harder for me to do that. It will be harder for all 'newbies' to do.
The name-calling and pettiness in some of the threads IS annoying, but those are not the things that would lead to a potential litigation problem. The problem is that the BOI allows someone to say "hey, this guy ripped me off". That's the potentially libelous remark that can cause problems. That's the entire PURPOSE of the BOI, too--that's what makes it valuable. If people can't say that, it's completely useless. Don't argue over how to make the BOI friendlier, because that isn't the issue at hand. The issue is that the BOI, as a concept, needs funds backing it due to its very nature. There is no way to change its essential nature without making it useless and pointless.
With the economy still severely depressed, a lot of people are feeling the crunch--I know I am, my other business is making less than half of what it was this time last year. That's going to make fund-raising VERY hard. I hope that this disappearance isn't permanent, because I would like the opportunity to save the entire archive if it's really going away.
I just hope there IS some way to keep the BOI. Obviously selling it to anyone who doesn't have an established, long-term superb reputation is completely out of the question. But we'll all be poorer for not having it--in many cases, literally!
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