First of all I want to thank you for letting me know what your concerns are. I will address and answer all of them and provide you with additional feedback.
1. Regarding Dave Williams posting as Ben Lurkin. It is true that I have corresponded with Ben Lurkin a number of times over the past year. On several instances I confronted him directly about whether or not he was Dave Williams. I also verbally confronted Dave about this on the phone in the past and in all instances, Dave denied being this poster and in fact made up a story about how he was a friend of Dave's. It was all very convincing and I must admit that I personally was very upset to have learned in the trial that this was not true. I confronted Dave about it directly on the phone and told him how I felt and that it caused problems with his credibility to everyone - including the Judge. The problem was that management was accusing a number of posters on this forum as being Dave Williams and so it was like the boy who cried wolf. I would like to point out that DSU didn't turn out to be Dave Williams and management swore up and down that it was to me via email and during conversations on the phone. As a shareholder who was just trying to get to the bottom of everything, this was particularly upsetting to me. I did not lie to you. I was fooled along with everyone else in this regard.
2. If I was to assist this company with properly communicating with shareholders, it was important that I talk to everyone involved. Yes it is true that I spoke with all of the directors on a fairly regular basis. This was accelerated of course when I worked on the website and was under contract because I needed to ensure that requests to post information were sanctioned by the board and that I wouldn't have to pull information down if there was a conflict. It was necessarily that I build a constructive working relationship with Dave to facilitate getting the copying effort done and working on the website.
3. The copying fee. I put out all of the information on iHub including how much it was going to cost to have the documents copied. I got three competing estimates from other firms. Fresno is not exactly a huge place and due to the nature of the kinds of copies that were needed and the fact that there were many documents with odd sizes, staples, folds, clips and the like, the copying had to be done manually. Yes it is true that you may have found a website or company that charged a cheaper per copy fee for similar services, but no one approached me with an estimate or provided clear information that would have been helpful. I asked the shareholder community for input on many different occasions and all the information was updated almost daily in a sticky at the top of this message board. Keep in mind that I have a day job and was not willing to spend another 10 hours debating over a difference of maybe $500. Also, you have to consider that Dave Williams already had concerns about chain of custody with these documents and if he was going to sign off on having Kyle's friend transport them, I needed a bargaining chip. Since my own research supported the fact that this company was a legitimate company and had a good reputation, I chose to go with them. It is easy to be an armchair quarterback when you aren't spending dozens of hours on the phone with two people that hate each other trying to come to a compromise while satisfying dozens of shareholders who have given you their hard earned cash and are scrutinizing your every move on a public message board. If you don't like my decision because it was a little more expensive than you thought, provide me with the details and I will do an apples to apples comparison with the company you think would have been cheaper and provide you with a side by side analysis of the costs.
4. There has been a whole-sale effort on this message board to villanize Dave Williams since before the shareholder forum. Even though Dave Williams posted on here as Ben Lurkin, you didn't see him responding to posts about himself. Some of the things that were said about Dave personally I am sure were very hurtful. The same is true about Cristian and Kyle. People on here are animals when they are posting anonymously. Yes there were times where I defended Dave Williams personally - but not often. Most of my responses of this sort were in defense of an idea that we may have shared and many posters attempted to throw me into his camp just because we shared the same perspective from time to time. If you review my posts historically, you will see that I defended everyone equally when the personal accusations were unfounded or not documented and deleted many posts that simply were not tasteful.
5. I could not post information about Dave's alias on here until it was made public knowledge in the form of the trial briefs because it is against the TOU. I told folks I was burned up about it but wasn't willing to compromise my leadership role as moderator by setting a bad example. After the trial briefs were released and I spoke to Dave Williams personally and let him know how I felt, I spoke openly about it on this board. Your assertion that I don't call a spade a spade when I see one is not true. I am not going to accept baseless accusations without facts.
6. I went to trial and first responded to posters questions. If you review my posts from that time, all of them were in response to questions asked by other members on this board. I made it clear that no one looked good in the trial and my personal opinions were leveled unilaterally. I don't know about you but I don't have time to deal with this crap day in and day out for hours on end and the truth of the matter is I was busy that weekend and couldn't dedicate the time that I wanted to properly transcribe my notes. Some folks were thankful but other folks were inpatient and accusatory - you included. This is why I stopped answering questions and just put up the pre-trial briefs so that people could read through the issues themselves.
So you can think of me what you like, but I have taken the time to respond to all of your issues. If you have any follow up concerns, let me have those as well.
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