A rant on site funding

Be creative and add a business aspect. What you have here is a brand that has a large base of very loyal and comparatively affluent followers. As others already suggested, there are many ways to capitalize on the popularity of the name ASSEMblergames in the hardcore gaming world.

When I first read this post, I have to say that I found it quite whiny. I pointed out on numerous occasions that I would buy ASSEMbler merchandise in a heartbeat (e.g. shirts, mugs, phonecases maybe?), but giving money away is not my thing. I am registered in a multitude of large web forums, and none of them is asking for donations. The opportunity to earn money from this site is evident simply by the amount of visitors and its notoriety in the development scene. Brand it as an underground community for the true core of gaming, sell merchandise, host competitions with nice prizes that require a tiny entrance fee, optimize efficiency of bandwidth usage. I know there are many people here who would love to help you with that.

There has been a number of things happening here from the administrative side that I clearly do not support (deleting posts that proves a moderator wrong being my favourite!), but my support is always offered if I get a good incentive to uphold the community for the members I value.

Whether regulars donate or not, any active long-term member who contributes information and creates content on ASSEMblergames is giving you free money by making the site more valuable for a possible monetization decision. Now you are posting a rant and complain to those loyal members for not giving you any cash even though they are the ones who make this website possible on a daily basis - what kind of gratitude is this on your side, I ask?

I would also suggest that you should finally accept some of the help you have been offered on countless occasions. The forum style looks like dump for the past years, and everyone who reads the Feedback Forum knows that it's not due to no support offered by members. It seems like a bad return if not even small details in forum design ever change, but you are asking for money to pay maintenance.
The actual costs and these small things may not even be connected, you valuing donations by acknowledging donators' feedback, however, is.

 

How about shutdown the Assembler site for good and move on our lives or sell this site to someone else.

 

x

 

You make it sound like assembler provides the information on this site - Protip, its the members.

They could all move elsewhere. Annoying the people who actually make this site attractive to new members and actually provide the content would just be shooting yourself in the foot.

The people most likely to donate wouldnt be long term members who commit content and time FOR FREE. If anything, long term contributing members shouldnt be donating anything, its the ones benefiting from their time/content.

 

I don't think he care anymore but I could be wrong. I don't really know what else to say.....

If Kev have loss interests this site, he should give it someone else who willing in charge. That all I can say.

 

That's the thing though, why is this forum getting so much traffic? This forum is almost a ghost town. It isn't like there is a lot of new content coming up. Perhaps I am missing some legacy thing from before I started to browse this forum, but I haven't really seen any major community efforts during the past few years that would see this forum getting a lot of traffic. If the forum is getting a lot of hits from spambots and Google search results, bandwidth could be significantly reduced by making it text-only for visitors (a lot of forums do that).

I mean, I started coming to this forum because it is one of the few places where there is discussion on prototypes and unreleased games, but whenever I have posted about it recently, the amount of interest seems to be almost nil (e.g. here, here, here, here). The question becomes, what does the Assembler Games forum bring to the table, aside from being a place where people know they can get interest to buy their rare stuff? This forum has too many subsections where almost no discussion goes on, and even the key sections (rare and obscure gaming, and the unreleased games forum) have few active threads.

Personally, I think a better use of my money would be to pay for prototype releases, but those rarely come up here anyways.

 

Hmm perhaps you could sell homebrew & co. (homebrew game cartridges *no not reproductions*, modchips, etc.) to cope with the losses from server maintenance? I understand this is often more trouble than it's worth but who knows.

 

I'd like to see the site optimized before I donate much more. If what we get can be pushed considerably further then we could easily keep the site funded for long periods of time without even needing to think about donations. Or, given Kevin's history of health problems, if he disappeared for two+ months everything can hum along without fail. I do get a lot of random business through this place (I've had more than one person register here solely so they could PM me same day) and I have no qualms about giving back but I see no reason to burn tires for heat when we have perfectly good natural gas.

And I'm all for ads for guests. This place must get an incredible number of page views daily and it all adds up.

 

These are my main concerns. A little more accountability and willingness to improve the site would go a long way I think. At this point the fundraisers seem to pop up almost randomly and we have no idea what we are funding and why.

 

I don't think you're doing anything wrong, per se. Perhaps if people thought smaller, more donations would be forthcoming. In the past 24 hours, 673 registered users have visited the site. If each of them donated 10 cents, we would be half way to our monthly goal in one day. 4,071 registered users have logged in during the first week of May. If a third of them donated 10 cents, we would be over our monthly goal. OK... so there's not the option to donate less than $5, which perhaps seems a lot for a monthly goal. Maybe put it back to a yearly fundraiser with a $5 minimum, or allow smaller donations?

As you know, I've had financial issues and have been unable to donate for a while. I used to donate regularly, before the badge system was introduced, and never asked for recognition. In fact, I've donated since the badge system was introduced and not been given a badge, but you don't see me complain about that. I'm still unable to work but sod it, I'll donate. No complaints here! If I can afford to do it on a bare minimum income, I'm sure more people can.

Bye, then! That's the most ridiculous attitude I've ever head.

LOTS of sites and businesses sell merchandise. You can get mugs and T-shirts with your favourite magazine's logo on it, no doubt. Does that stop you buying the magazine? Of course not! You just ignore it. If you don't want to buy merchandise - fine. Plenty of members have been a part of the community for many years and are proud of it.

To those badmouthing Kevin, he owes you no explanation. If you don't follow, he's had health issues for years. Health comes first, and we've always respected that. That he has any loyalty to keeping the site going is proof enough that he wants to do so. There have been explanations of why dedicated servers are needed, and some stats, before.

Likewise, some people clearly don't understand high volume websites. Take Xboxsegafan187's collection thread. His initial post has 22 photos at a total of 13.3Mb. The thread has been viewed 1,232 times. That means that, excluding text and other images, this one thread has used up 16.385Gb in 10 weeks.... on the first post alone! That's 1.64Gb per week, on average. On one thread. Now, I'm being fair and saying ALL 1,232 views saw those photos. On top of that, he posted a huge amount of update photos - around 80 of them! If we said they're 500Kb each, that's another 40Mb of photos. Even if only a tenth of all thread views have seen all the photos, that's still another 5Gb on top.

 

There was the custom amount option, does it bottom out at $5 bare minimum on there?

I put a little bit towards it as I'm also not making a huge amount of money and am trying to also organize a move from Australia to the US at some stage as well otherwise I would've just covered this month's fees outright despite the currency conversion. >_<;

 

Yes, minimum amount is $5 regardless. It comes up with a pop-up if you try anything less. That's a lot for a monthly donation to a forum, even if it removed ads or something like that, and certainly without perks. As mentioned before, it's worth it for those who sell regularly in the marketplace and get 100% of the money... which could explain the same users always donating? If we could donate less, perhaps more people would donate?

I assume the donation bar at the top is manually controlled, as my donation hasn't been added 6 hours later. Is there perhaps something that might automate this process? If it uses vBDonate, it will automatically confirm donation and put the user on the awards system if you upgrade to the pro version ($54.95 a year or $84.95 for life).

 

Well, that sucks. Kinda makes having the custom amount option a tad redundant in that case.

But I do certainly agree about making ads show up as it would be a start towards it all.

Overall, I'm mainly donating to support the site given the overall quality of content across the forums so I'm not particularly fussed about perks or anything of the sort but if Kevin did implement ads, then to also remove them from my browsing.

So something that could be easily added if ads were implemented, at the bare minimum a $1-$2 USD donation to remove ads for the month or so, higher than $5 gets a site supporter user tag and so-on.

 

@ retro.
nobody said they owed anything...
as for that xbox collection..
yeah, i get it..
the thing is insane, so insane it CRASHES my computer on occasion! that's just a board UI thing!
...
as for health issues, i'm english...
1, in poor health too...
2, as above, BEYOND my capacity to CARE!
i have my own issues that's nothing to do with web!
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i'm NOT badmouth anybody but being honest, and the MORE i see/ENCOUNTER from some of the users from here, maybe you have a point?
IT GOES HAND IN HAND!
if the users themselves are elitist pricks, why would anybody pay for that, lest hang around!?
......
[edit]
typo

 

I would try an instant buy of assembler mugs or tshirts. Love those and can use em. If i finish any hardware or sell some gamedisks i will domate some to this website. But i agree something properbly has to change/morph to give more power to those who truely support the site somehow. Also i support hosting files will need payment somehow. I drop one of my domainnames anyway soon, it will give me some more money to spend, can we not all just save those 0,10 cents every month and donate?

 

You need to calm down. The only part I aimed at you was that single paragraph telling you that you were overreacting by saying you'd leave if Kevin started selling mugs. That's ridiculous. If you don't want to buy something, just ignore it. As far as I remember, you weren't moaning about server costs. The other paragraphs addressed those people wondering how a site costs so much to run - it's because it's popular and serves a lot of information, a lot of pictures and hence uses a lot of bandwidth! And it is run properly on a dedicated server, not on crappy shared hosting.

A lot of people demanded to know where the money was going, why the server costs so much, why things haven't been upgraded to a manner that users feel would be better for them etc. So yes, people think they are owed explanations.

Many of us have health issues - myself included. You'll see me post a lot one week, not so much the next. Likewise, if Kev has to deal with his health issues, THAT COMES FIRST. Of course he'll be unable to tackle server upgrades and the like. Umm... I'm not sure how being English is a health issue? It's never been a problem for me, lol! For someone who says they're English, you sound more non-native , to be honest. That's not a negative statement before you get your knickers in a twist again - plenty of people here are foreign and do a damn fine job at communicating with us in English - I know we'd do a lousy job communicating in their languages so effectively! I'm happy to have a discussion with anyone from any country on the forum, as long as they respect other users. We talk tech speak, so language can be a barrier - I'm amazed at how well everyone does. And whether a user has an issue communicating because of not being a native English speaker, a disability, learning difficulties or any such barrier, I'd like to think we all welcome them as equals. Getting over such barriers is a far better accomplishment than knowing everything there is to know about a subject and being arrogant with it! Anyway, I know that sometimes things can be misinterpreted by non-native English speakers, so hopefully we all have patience with them and help them understand what was said.

People actually hang around because the user base is, by and large, a friendly bunch. Go to other gaming sites and you'll find petty, immature people who don't give a damn about the other people who appear as words on their screen and think they can abuse them. Not here. Likewise, none of us moan about our health. We might mention it quietly, then other users respect that and bear it in mind. You get nowhere by being an idiot and unhelpful, I'm sure you'll agree - and people won't stay on a forum full of idiots. Well, idiots might!

 

^^ i meant 'english' as in a BANE the civilized world (the queens realm and her lackeys) but that's sidetracking.
..
i'll try to be clear...
given cost have to get covered, but merchandising comes after the site has been refined!
new user sets up account but tears his face off trying to navigate board UI, they're not gonna get as far as the merch.
better still, if the site isn't 100% by point of existence (what ASSEMbler is truly about) doubt very much the merch would be selling, the name would just be that and synonymous with just a chatboard!
...
and NEVER, EVER overlook those who dedicate time to the cause, if i had cash to spare, i'd throw it at the situation knowing that BOUGHT CLASS AT ASSEMbler give you afluenza and right of way to do f*ckall and be a parasite, DEAD STRAIGHT i'm there! the REAL world says otherwise, i can't just whizz cash at the problem and remove myself from obligation/responsibility to community!
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thing is, Bad_Ad84 could NOT have been more clear!
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i'm NOT against funding but JESUS CHRIST, get this ship in order first THEN bring on the goods....
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[edit]
typo..

 

maybe you should start listening to some of the things the community has asked for and provide them, im sure this would encourage more donations

also i know you have also returned donations that have been sent before for whatever reason so money cant be too bad if you are in a position that you can return donations from members

also your hosting costs do seem excessive, why dont you take some of the advice that has been given to you and try to look for a better solution?

however you moaning like a child that its the same people everytime does not help and quite frankly makes you look ungrateful, forced donations or fee's are not the answer in my opinion you need to add value to the site to ensure people do donate money but never forget its a donation so you cant expect them, if you want guaranteed money then setup a VIP system or something similar that people can subscribe too

 

x

 

You can also locate image hosting on a cheaper server. A small orange offered hosting with no scripting just for bandwidth. Serving all the large images from something like that and keep main server just for the scripts would improve loading times and decrease costs.