How much to buy Letsbeef
 

@X @Pugz what’s the price looking like.

IIRC Rule's offer was close to 5 digits. And they weren't interested.

Like, 9,999 close or....?

Well ... :high: ... I have never thought about selling myself.

Honestly, why would you buy LB?? Honestly can't say this is a valuable site. If it were to be sold, that price would probably reflect the desire to collect on some of the man-hours put into this thing, not future valuation.

I can see Bonnie Godiva putting some money up for the BARS :p

It's already been stated multiple times it's not for sale. A more interesting question is is there a figure that would be accepted for majority ownership.

I bet it would be for sale if someone offered a few million dollars.

Then again, X made a company that Google bought out, so he might be rich as hell already...

Oh, I'm sure. I've just always heard that X & Pugz wouldn't sell due to nostalgia but perhaps it would be easier to convince them if they were still in the loop. Besides if anyone did buy it they would do very well to pay for X's services as a coder as no one knows the site better than him.

From a technical standpoint, buying the site would probably be pretty hard, especially if you want to change things. The codebase is pretty old and would need a major rebuild, as I'm assuming not much has been done to it recently. Mobile is a huge part of the game right now, and adding a functional mobile site would be insanely time consuming, as you'd probably have to move to an MVC framework, which requires rewriting most of the site.

I'm also going to guess that the site is losing money right now and Pugz/X are mainly keeping it hosted for the sake of nostalgia/it's probably not that expensive to host.

---------- Post added at 04:49 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:40 PM ----------

Do you guys remember FlyHipHop, which was LBv4???

I'm going to guess right now that it was built as a separate site simply because the codebase of this site was so outdated and impossible to really update. Any major improvements that you guys would want to do would probably require a similar type of rebuild.

---------- Post added at 04:57 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:49 PM ----------

FWIW, if any of you guys ever do end up buying the site, or if X/Pugz ever try to rebuild the site in a significant fashion, I have no problem at all with doing a few hours a week to help out around here. I can't say that I know shit about PHP as it's a pretty old technology, but I'm pretty handy with most modern JS frameworks that you would probably want to upgrade to.

I talked to X and asked him "How much you want for it?" He turns, looks at me and said "about three fitty".

Well considering that X was going to close the site, and ended up giving it to Pseudo and Pugz instead, I don't think nostalgia is THAT strong a motivation.

Every time I talked to X, he told me he isn't doing this for profit. That was his mistake. You don't put your all into changing something if you have no gain out of it. Nostalgia? X hasn't battled, made a crew or voted since 2007, how nostalgic is he really going to be?

I've always liked the idea of someone buying it. X did solid on his return, but now it's very evident that "the new site" is LB v5 version 3, it's not coming and it's not actively being worked on.

RULE was my pick at the time. Guy cares about LB, but is adult enough to treat it like an actual investment for himself and his family. Me and RULE talked a lot about advertising and he had a lot of avenues he wanted to approach about it. The fact LB hasn't been advertised since 2006 is insanity.

A site needs about 400 unique views a day to be able to add adverts to it (and remember, X is deliberately handing away 1/4 if his potential profits by advertising BeatDisk, a website he started and stopped running about 7 years ago. LB gets more than enough unique views, the problem would simply be that the hosting is expensive (although a good chunk of it could have been paid off when everyone was making donations, unfortunately it only paid for Pugz' pretend rap battle host career).

You guys should find out the Financials of this place before you start wanting to buy it. In my mind, X is probably doing us a favor by keeping this place open. You will also have to think about a tech team. Straight out I am willing to work as a Dev for free/equity in the site depending on how much you want to do, but you will probably need more people. Idk if anyone else here has Dev experience, maybe mindless???

You don't need any experience to be a dev. Apparently all you have to do is be Russian, find a guy named Pugz, take his money and never do anything ever again.

Letsbeef is worth nowhere near 5 figures. I could understand the code being worth a couple grand and maybe the site holding sentimental value driving the price up. But I'm almost positive it's coded shitty and looking online for LB's alexa rankings and other metrics, LB falls further down the rankings weekly. This site couldn't even generate you $200/month in ad revenue. If they say otherwise they're lying to you

^This.

It's nowhere near worth 5 figures considering it's massive downwards trend. The code is fairly simple to replicate. I am pretty sure that in about 1 week I could recreate the entire site in Java or C#, and I'm not even well trained at this stuff right now.

So basically, you're buying the brand and SEO. The site still hits really high on searches, and the brand makes all of us keep logging on. With the brand terribly fleeting, alone with the market in which the site originally sits, it's likely not anywhere near 7500.

With some work on branding, advertising and marketing, including some more updates and innovation, sure, we could see something happening that turns it into a more profitable site. But no one's working on that stuff.

Just if we think in simple terms, I absolutely hate it as I never really got into the iPhone craze, but in major websites you have your menu now signalled by the three horizontal lines. This is clear everywhere. LB has the globe for some reason. It's just about adopting the website to modern times, and then crafting out a piece of innovation which frankly is in an unexplored market.

No one is doing rap battle stuff anymore, even though the actual rap battle market is booming.

LB needs to be more shiny and glossy in it's appearance. That's what people want in 2017. Websites are all typically laid out the same, and that's because the market has pushed that direction. Because of the warping of people's minds through bytesized information like Twitter and Reddit, no one wants complexity. No one wants to "figure it out". LB needs to be insanely accessible and open for rapid use of the site. Currently, it's not. We'd still need to explain to people what to use.

I'd love to get full control of LB cause I honestly think I'd be able to do a lot with it based off the structure and combining ideas of what makes LB currently / formerly great and what people want in 2017 for a website. But alas, I'm broke as fk :D

Most to all of the backend work could probably be kept. IDK about how this site is hosted but I'm just going to guess that the admins have done all of the hard work in figuring out scalability and all of that jazz. If traffic were to increase there may be some other stuff that would need added in terms of DB sharding, microservices, or just general cleanup, but by in large that should be good. That right there is worth money. Not a ton, but there are a lot of features on here that work and were probably built from the ground up.

The actual site is the part that needs work. Mobile is a huge part of the game right now and having a real mobile site or even an app should be the first priority. The site right now is alright but could be better. Mobile would require either building out an entire app in Java, or by using an Angular/React native bundler. In my mind, using a React Native/Nativescript bundler would make more sense, as you could also build out a desktop and a mobile responsive site with the same framework. IDK, it's a lot of work. Just to rebuild the site, clean up bugs, and add either a PWA site or a straight up app would take a while to rewrite everything, probably several months for 2-3 guys part time. It's doable, but would be slow.

As stated before, I'm down to help out, but don't really have the time or the experience (especially on the mobile side) to lead, you'd probably want someone that's already working on it.

X is probably doing you guys a favor by not allowing you to buy this place, real talk.

>building the site in Java or C#

Okay, but those aren't really web browser languages. I mean, yeah, you CAN run Java in the browser but why would you?

Honestly, the best thing would be for someone to come in as an investor I think. Somebody that can put in the money and time to find additional programmers and pay for them to help X out with what is essentially a hobby.

I don't know precisely how the ownership of this site breaks down, but I don't really think that someone paying outright for the site makes a lot of sense.

The most sensible way in my mind is for a group of individuals to submit a proposal to X to work on the site. Most likely this will be a group of programmers. This proposal will probably be for a certain percentage of equity in the site, which is received upon completion. X doesn't really lose anything as he's already (presumably) losing money on the site and may close it down anyway, and the team doesn't have to pay up front for a losing product. At that point, any sort of larger ownership deal can be arranged between the two parties.

This protects the buyer from paying for a site that may well go under, and provides X with an easy potential escape route out of a losing situation.

ill start the bid.... 50 bucks.

Hell, if I invest and put hundred in, I at least want a red name haha.

The thing is, X has a full time job outside of LB. He can’t help us if he tried tbh. We need like 3 X’s working on this site if it’s going to do anything.

Gofundme?

First question is who around here could be a useful contributor in terms of working on the site.

I haven't learned php. Had I learned it, I'd be able to recreate it in as much time in that language. My point is that it's very easy to recreate the site. It's not complex.

Coding is all logic based, and it's very easy to logically break apart the battle system, ratings systems etc.

Why would someone invest in the site if some inactive guy with a negative history on the site remains the one in charge? The owner has no interest in profiting, but you think an investor would still be okay to put in money? What exactly is the "investment" there?

I think you're vastly underestimating the complexity of building something like this. Especially with consideration to the fact that everything is built as a hack to work off of the forum system. There's a LOT of fuckery happening in the backend. I will say that starting from scratch probably WOULD be easier than going in and fucking around with someone else's code. Especially since I'm willing to bet the code for this site is spaghetti as fuck after all the shit it's been through as far as development goes.

I think you should let EtH run this site tbh... the guy knows all about LB's history an shit, who did what when an all that, his like a football fan of the site or something you know?

Also he cared about the site that much that he had that beef with Pugz over it cause Pugz was steady fucking the whole site up an shit, X swooped in for a moment to fix it up somewhat though.

Also EtH spends his days getting drunk and throwing things at birds, this dude got the time to run the site an i think he would do a splendid job.

I don't really even know who originally built this site, but I'm just going to state outright that they are a high level coder that could work as a senior, if not a tech lead for a lot of startups. This site actually does a huge amount of stuff, and is extremely impressive for a side project. There are definitely guys that I known that work at big time companies that would struggle to build a site of this magnitude part time.

One of the biggest, if not the biggest reason that this site got huge back in the day over other forums and stuff is because it is such an advanced site.

The site was coded by X, Pseudo Him and V. Pseudo Nim coded most of the back end stuff and was the main developer.

Soooooo there won't ever be a Fully Mobile LB huh?

Who is V? I don't believe I've ever heard of him.

https://www.letsbeef.com/forums/member.php?u=20
V is a former admin and is the guy whose voice you hear in this video:
https://www.letsbeef.com/video/lb-final.html
When LB started, X's role was more of the front-end developer/graphic design guy, Pseudo Nim's role was more of the back-end developer guy, and V was more of the business man and took care of the business/legal aspect of things.
To my knowledge, he was never really involved as a day to day site admin type of person. He left and sold his share of the site a long time ago (around 2010?) to X and Pseudo Nim, but still continued to work with X on other sites and business ventures, including Rocbattle.
I've met both X and Pseudo Nim in person (separately) but I never met V.

I'm talking about the main part of the site being the battle system. Im not entirely sure if the player is hand coded or if it's a plugin so I'll amend and remove anything to do with audio.

But as for the battle system itself? Very easy. There's quite a lot of little bits to it for sure, but it's a lot of small little easy sections which add up pretty effortlessly. There was some solid innovation in the design to begin with but we're well beyond the time where it deserves credit.

The hacks are mostly just downloads. How many of LBs vbulli hacks are handwritten and specific to only this site?

It's not a complex idea. Because it offers no integration with apps or external sources, nothing is hard. To actually bring LB forward I wouldn't be anywhere near the level required, because just making the relevant aspects responsive yet consistent with the desktop site, I can't break that up logically right now. But where Lb currently sits? Not hard.

No. It would probably require an entire rewrite of the front end. A fully mobile Letsbeef would be a long term undertaking.

That's not true. There will be a mobile site, probably at some point in 2018. It is already under development, and everyone currently on staff has seen it and knows what I'm talking about.

Before I went to jail, I had almost completed a mobile site based on the Zurb Foundation framework. X decided to start all over from scratch using Bootstrap because it is more cohesive with the later versions of vbulletin which we plan on upgrading to because those are also built on Bootstrap.
I know from personal experience that rewriting the front end is not hard at all. The hard part will be coding some of the new features we plan to have. Also, if and when we upgrade vbulletin, we are likely to lose a lot of features we currently enjoy because they come from mods and plug-ins for which there are no equivalent in the latter versions.

I mean, I guess you can just set size limitations in the HTML and create a responsive site like that, but that's a pretty crappy way to build. PHP is a pretty old language and doesn't really have any of the advantages that a modern framework would have.

I'm not a PHP guy since it's an older paradigm that I don't really see a need for in the modern day, but here's what I see wrong with doing it that way....

Lack of newer plugins and packages due to PHP being outdated.

A responsive PHP/HTML would struggle a lot with speed because of too many calls to the api due to the lack of a proper state container.

Lack of mobile browser caching beyond what HTML provides that I'm aware of.

Lack of a single page design that would limit calls to the server.

Speed is the name of the game in mobile, and PHP sacrifices a lot of the advantages that most pages get in the modern era.

I have spent a lot of time working on front end architecture, and I really think that building a site of this size in PHP is a really bad idea. For a real mobile site, to me you would rewrite most of the front-end.

There are some sites out there that PHP is still useful for. Letsbeef is probably not one of them, I think it's too large and complex for a really good PHP mobile app. Other frameworks were designed largely to help deal with complexity on the frontend.

A LB mobile site today would better than what we have now, but I strongly suspect would struggle with performance. Ideally the site would be re-written for mobile, but that's a lot of work and I guess I get why that won't happen.

Louie, NOBLE has basically been defending Pugz, X, basically anyone in charge since day one. I mean he used to bitch so much at me bitching about v4....now we're sitting here on v3 4 years later. The "wait and see" "it's happening" bollocks means fucking nothing.

Where in this thread have I defended anyone or said "wait and see?"

Its not true that there won't be a mobile site. It'll probably be out in 2018.


In other words...wait and see.

I'm not telling you to wait though. I'm just giving my own guess as to when we may see a mobile LB, and the statement wasn't made to defend anyone. You don't have to wait if you don't want to.