Okay, this bothers me. My local games store has its own discussion forum on Delphi Forums, and, as such, I have a Delphi membership so I can check up on what's happenning there. I got an e-mail from Delphi this morning saying, basically, that they're losing money and it's ALL MY FAULT. And they weren't even nice about it. Excerpts follow:

"Advertising on the Internet has not been a windfall for anyone. You know it, and we know it. More importantly you have proven it by ignoring almost all Delphi Forums advertising efforts."

"It requires enormous infrastructure to host our millions of members and hundred million plus page views per month. Greedy investors and an irrational public market paid for that good infrastructure for a long time."

"We recently introduced the finest information gathering, knowledge sharing, and communication service in the world. It's called DelphiPlus. We want and need you to pay for it."

Now, the first quotation up there is about the rudest, most tactless way that could have been phrased. Just op the top of my head, I can come up with about fourteen other ways of saying that that aren't nearly so obnoxious. How about dropping that trite "you know it and we know it" garbage and rephrasing the rest of the sentence as "our advertising is not generating enough click-throughs?"

The second quotation just plain doesn't make sense to me. It certainly appears to be saying "everyone who ever did click on our ads is an idiot anyway." Am I reading that wrong?

As for the third part, after calling everyone who did not click on their ads (I'm sorry, but I was never interested in their internet dating services) a boor, and everyone who did a moron, they have the audacity not merely to ask but to DEMAND that I send them my money so they can stay in business. Am I the only one who isn't going in for this?

Perhaps the reason they're going out of business is because nobody there know what the hell he's doing. Whoever is in charge of these mailings certainly doesn't. And if you'd like to read the whole thing, thinking perhaps that I've misrepresented part of it, I've linked to it below.