Deron Beal is, first and foremost, a marketing guy. There's an old
joke commonly told about sales & marketing people:

Q: "How can you tell if the marketing guy is lying?"

A: "If his lips are moving."

DB is an effective marketing guy, because he has convinced many
thousands of people to believe things which are clearly, verifiably,
untrue. He has convinced people to believe his current "truth" above
their own memories, and to do things clearly to their own detriment.

He also manages to keep TFN in recent press coverage. He has had at
least two favorable write-ups in Yahoo in the past week, and also
appeared in The Mountain Astrologer, much to my disgust.

In reply to one of the Yahoo write-ups, I posted the following
comment. It did not immediately appear, so I am not sure if it will. I
am posting it here for the edification of anyone who may not have been
around in those fun, exciting early days of freecyclin'. The Yahoo
author asked readers to respond if they knew of other free recycling
groups, so respond I did!

********** Begin my response ***********
There are several other networks of local free reuse groups besides
freecycle. This Wikipedia link is a good place to start your research:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regiving

Scroll down to the External Links - Regiving Networks. You will find
there are many groups which are actively finding new homes for usable
items in the hope of diminishing landfill inflows.

The nice thing about the freecycle alternatives is that the members
aren free to do their local giving without interference from a man who
has megalomaniacal tendencies and a very sensitive ego.

Just for the record, the man who started Tucson Freecycle did not
invent the idea. He did not coin the word. He was not the first to use
the word freecycle in its currently popular contaxt. He does not hold
a trademark or copyright on the terms freecycle, freecycling,
freecycled, or freecycler.

Deron Beal did invite the founders, owners and moderators of other
free recycling groups around the world to join his Yahoo group to
discuss what worked and didn't work well for managing the free
recycling groups. He invited these same founders and owners to list
their groups on his directory site (freecycle.org) so people would
have one central place where they could look to find groups near them.
He DID tell these same people they were welcome to freely use the name
"freecycle" in their group names and email addresses. And, because of
the preceding, he DID popularize the term "freecycle" and all its
derivatives.

THEN, he got more than a little power-crazy, and began declaring that
he OWNED all the groups which had listed themselves in his directory.
He began having Yahoo (which hosts most of these groups) close down
any group which dared to differ from him on any issue of importance.
He began coercing owners to make him or his proxy email address
"ersatzfriend" a co-owner of every group, on pain of being removed
from his directory site.

Then he began actually stealing groups from the people who founded and
developed them, abusing his co-owner status to do this. The groups
which did not add Deron Beal's "ersatzfriend" as a co-owner were not
just removed from the freecycle.org directory listing, they were
deleted by Yahoo - utterly destroyed - at Mr. Beal's behest. It is in
this way that Mr. Beal came to control so many groups.

The free recycling movement remains strong and vibrant, outside of TFN
(The Freecycle Network, Deron's corporate reincarnation of the
original freecycle directory). Currently, the free recycling movement
lacks a central directory resource precisely because of the egregious
abuses perpetrated by Deron Beal.

Please do your part to strengthen and grow the truly free, genuinely
grassroots free recycling groups. You can find links to them through
the Wikipedia link above. Freecycle on!