A rant on site funding

The package i have can actually cope with quite a bit of traffic, it is shared hosting but on two of the sites running under my profile were generating access logs in the 700mb daily each. They only issue i ever had was when one of the hosts got DDoS and they did shut the account down for 4 hours and it effected all sites on the shard apparently haha.

This is with Dreamhost btw. a plan called happy hoster if they still do it, ive had it for years.

Im not a web site guru by any means however and will most likely be corrected, but just trying to offer a suggestion.

@Assembler - Ads may be the way to go, with a tiered membership. those who support the site dont see them those who dont can.

 

Any forced donations is a terrible idea. I know its been a few years since I donated for one reason or another, primarily finishing a Master's degree, but that is a risk we all take when we have a website. There are loads of ways to monetize the "Assember" brand if that was a route people wanted to take, I seem to recall T-Shirt contests years ago. Ads as people are saying are fine and would make enough to offset the cost. And all sorts of other ideas. Look at other popular forums and see what works, see what doesn't.

 

I don't get that much business and don't get me wrong when i do i'm grateful for it. Now, i don't like to talk about these types of things to anybody but i do get periods when where business is dead for a month or 2 and when i hit a month where there is a few sales, it not much. So i think it's reasonable at this rate that i'm donating that much at this point. Of course if things pick up, i'll be happy to donate more, i love the site and i'd hate to see it go.

 

^^ THAT! :friendly_wink:
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still no easy way around the issue but that says it all!
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as long as some balance is drawn, as support TO THE SITE exists in many forms! (text contribution makes at least half the reason anybody decides to show up, we're all looking for answers, and some attempt to answer!)

 

A donation of 5$ first time you start selling something, hold for 4 months. Not for each sale.

 

I think you could also half your hosting bills per month quite easily, however without knowing what your $120 hosting bills per month gets you, its hard to say if its a good or bad deal. Personally i think its on the expensive side compared to what you can get, if your paying your host to manage / update the server too its not a bad deal.

OVH, who are big in Europe now offer servers in the US, see: http://www.soyoustart.com/us/offers.xml

The SYS-E32-1 server would be more then enough to host this site, any many others.

• Intel Xeon E3 1225v2 (4x Cores at 3.2 GHz+)
• 32gb RAM
• 2x 2TB SATA hard drives
• 200 Mbps guaranteed bandwidth
• 1Gbps connection (to other networks OVH peer with)

You can get that for $50 + one off setup free, or $588 upfront for a year, with no setup fee. That's less than half what you are paying now, however as i mentioned i dont know if you are managing the server yourself or paying your current host to do that. The server above you would have to manage yourself.




As you would have such a powerful server you could easily have a few virtual machines on there and offer services for members.

• Dedicated Virtual Machine for running assemblergames.com
• Dedicated Virtual Machine running Zpanel to offer members hosting with PHP + MySQL
• Dedicated Virtual Machine offering a FTP mirror of all the files that have been posted here over the years

Members web hosting could be a donation perk, as could access to an FTP with an archive of files.

Just some random ideas for you anyway, i'm more than happy to help out with the server side of things if you ever wanted to go this route.

 

x

 

but what about those people who want to sell but don't want to use ebay, those who use this site to help other members not just to get money from selling stuff ?

 

why not a $1 per item list fee in the sellers forum
im sure you can set the forum up to not allow people to make threads without meeting the 50 post requirement

 

Who is going to police that? Again, other communities survive without issue. Move away from this seller fee thing, it's terrible and just hurts the users, let alone the staff who would be needed to do it. And we do have PM's, so do we allow other people to read those?

Why don't we look at encouraging donations through user benefits? I know we discussed these in the past, along with the museum, but nothing has come really. Donate X amount for an increase in PM box size, for instance. Little things that add up.

 

I might be wrong, but I have a feeling there's not enough sales going on for a 'tax' on them to help much, unless you take a percentage, which will probably just drive the bigger sales 'underground'.

Better to think about targeting individual users imho. How about sth simple like a membership fee model - pay up or have your account suspended, or limited in some way (e.g. can't post, only read), until you do? Even at the hypothetical super low price of $1/3mo it'd only take 360 active users to break even. To not scare away new users, maybe make that fee apply only to users above a certain age or post count (this might go hand in hand with the post count requirements already in place for the marketplace?). And some people can't pay via PayPal, or have other reasons for not being able to pay, so it could be useful to be able to exempt some users from that fee. All that would require extra code though - wouldn't want to manage all that by hand. I wouldn't be surprised though if someone had cooked up a plugin like that already.

Regarding the 'why $120?' discussion, I too think there's potential for some major improvements on that front - but unless someone comes up with a way to reduce the costs to zero, there'll still be a funding problem.

 

Assembler

Take my £20, Where to donate?

Edit

I just donate it now Kev.. Come on you members, Stop being a cheap bastard.

 

I think the ads for non-members is a good idea. Although I do browse sometimes without logging in.

 

We have asked about why the hosting costs what it does and discussed ways to make the hosting cheaper - Assembler does not care about reducing costs nor even giving any information about what the costs cover.

Lack of transparency when fund raising is likely an issue too, not just "people being cheap". If you do not want to improve things on the site, its "too much work" nor want to get costs reduced with fairly little work - people arent going to want to fund that, surely.

If you dont want people to help get costs to a reasonable level nor do any work thats needed doing for years - just put ads for guests.

Whats the costs for? bandwidth? = remove the stupid logos/post count icons and you will instantly cut into that.
Server performance? = what web server are you using? apache? nginix? there is likely lots of optimization to be done by someone who does this for a living.

Id focus on actually getting the site streamlined and working optimally, you would likely half the costs. Which in turn would make people more willing to donate knowing you have done your best to reduce costs before putting up a donations box every month. As mentioned above, lots of sites exist just fine without a monthly donation rally.

 

Well, Improving this site is always welcome, However do I like to have a new feature as Notification, When someone reply to your comment then Notification pop up to let you know. That would be handy and save time instead of going backward or forward in the thread.

Put advertise for guest and small amount of fees in selling page would good idea too.

 

i don't have any probs donating. i havent been a member here very long and i do not post very much. i am here cause i love vintage gaming. i will help others with problems if its an area i can help.

i agree with the ads for guests and for users who use the site as a somewhat store to sell things and dont support the site with donations, only they can decide if they feel like they wish to support the site. i have purchased from folks here and have been very happy with my purchases and will continue to support them also.

i always support devs and coders on their projects i feel i get benefit from. i totally enjoy assembler and will be donating again when i get done here.

 

i,am pretty new here and have a good time at this forum i just logged on to see the donate bar so i donated after that i saw this thread and i thought what the **** i thought its pretty normal to donate form something like this i know its not free so why not donate.

anyway the new donate option is pretty neet i have not found any other ways to donate yet so this option with it being prompt in my face when i logon is a good idea to wake up some ppl i think??

 

A couple of points:

- I donated a few years ago, and the promised "site supporter" banner never appeared in my profile.

- Why does it cost $120 per month to run what is essentially a low volume forum? It isn't like this place is getting thousands of posts per day.

 

sheer bandwidth use likely. we have over 1.2k people viewing the forum right now and last year we hit 10k.

What I'd really like is assembler merch, i'd shoot for a cup or a t-shirt on any given day, not sure if its that you dont wanna sell out or s/t

 

^^ merch?
yeah, another site tried that, went side ways, blew up in faces and NOW, she's NO longer on-air...
the place already 'sold-out' by the amount of ADS penetrating ABP! (ask SPPV about that)
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if the 'merch' appears here, i predict BAD THINGS! (+me for one WALKING!)
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clean up site, add ACTUAL usable features, something the end user can use? (the other place offered FTP account and various other perks for VIP status, the place had it's own team of repairs specialists that for a premium, users got their box's fixed)
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assembler is just a FORUM, there's NOTHING to offer besides that!
making merch based on the above is....
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either way, admin calls shots! (and as i dig into the forums, deeper, i can see why some of the established members would have a gripe)
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[edit]
pos keyboard...