Next Sunday, July 23, this website and forum will turn 4 years young.

As the age of websites should be measured in dog years, it is now really grown up, but still has its best years ahead, hopefully.

Anybody would like to reminisce about the last 4 years or have any ideas of what to do for the anniversary?

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Congratulations L-G on another year. Time has flown by!

Do you have any screenshots of the first days of the site- I can't remember what the front page used to look like with the old header and no blog!

Sorry, no screen shots, but I've got the old home page html somewhere on my well-organised hard disk.
But I'm just today moving to my first new PC in over 7 years, so it might get a bit messy with getting everything set up and the daily publishing pipeline working again...

Basically, back then, 4 years ago, it was just these forums and a simple Welcome home page. The weekly My Lamma e-zine only came in just a few weeks later. At first, it was just a 1-2-page text-only email reminder about what's new in the forums, sent to the handful of registered forum members only...

1,451 forum members now, 2,216 topics discussed so far with 22, 891 messages, meaning on average 16 messages/day over the last 4 years...

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Click here for Lamma-zine stories and recent Lamma Spotlights of the Week:
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Congratulations Lamma-Gung. Well done.

May I suggest this year focusing on getting one or more of the local property agents/guest house operators listing on your site. Maybe if you threaten to open your own on-line property agency it'll shake them up enough to enter the modern age. It would be so useful to people. I notice your buy/sell/rent threads don't get many replies, but they get a fair number of lookers. If there was some real information in the threads, like a pic, I suppose they'd get a lot more.

Well, I've tried for years to get some of them online, and still they're not even using email yet and Internet is a foreign world for them.

Property agents are the local businesses who could profit MOST from this website, I think. One little ad finding even a single customer will make them a profit of thousands (rent) or tens of thousands dollars (sale, or even hundreds of tousands if it's their own flat) of instant cash profit.

Basically, their argument for not advertising or using the Internet in any form, is:
As long as we get all the customers we'll ever need just walk through our doors along Main Street every day, why make any extra efforts? If people want to buy or rent a flat they'll have to come out to Lamma anyway and look at the places, so why promote it off-island! That's their fixed, unchanging thinking and no argument will change their mind, I think. "We've always done business this way and we've all become so rich, why change our old ways?"

The only property agent who has ever used this website is Fok Ming (David Leung & co.) for a few weeks, having me shoot a renovated property for sale and make a advertising web page and a prinyted A3-size poster for their shop window. Then they decided they don't need the Internet at all and it's cheaper to save a few hundred dollars and only have me shoot the photos and make a poster, but cancel the ad at the top of the home page. I've done several flat posters for their shop window by now and I don't mind doing it for a bit of pocket money. But none of the other property agents has ever been anything but totally negative about a website or actually advertising their flats in any media, printed or online.

Most of the local property agents live off very nicely from buying and selling their own properties, becoming multimillionaires long ago. They only do sales for other properties because of the still nice commission. Offering flats for rent is their least profitable task, by far the least interesting to them. As the supply of rental flats is currently pretty small, there's very little activity in this market as well.

Well, anyway, if anybody can convince any property agents or big landlord or developer to change their minds and advertise or promote their flats and houses on this site, you can get 1/3 of the total income as a commission, similar to finding a new advertiser for this website. Easy money?

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Click here for Lamma-zine stories and recent Lamma Spotlights of the Week:
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Ironic then that they complained when someone was trying to rent their flat out via this website!