Mike
Well-Known Member
***EDIT***
This thread has been running in a closed, private forum for several days and many of the forum members involved feel it is best to open this discussion up to all members.
This one may come as a shock to some of you, whilst others are already aware.
I am placing the T-Bucket Forums up for sale. There are a lot of reasons for this decision, not the least of which is the fact that I am simply tired. I've been bashing code for as long as I care to do. There have been some very special changes in my life and I am wanting to spend more time enjoying those blessings.
I don't want anyone to dash to the donations page, because I don't want to extend any of my obligations to anyone. But I've been caught up in a financial crunch. The site grew to a point where I could no longer operate it on an inexpensive hosting plan and we moved to an excellent VPS host about a year ago. We were getting regular donations and we had 4 forum sponsors that were allowing us to keep growing and adding new features. Since the first of the year, we have lost two of our sponsors, donations have dropped to nearly zero and I'm still sitting atop a closet full of t-shirts. I had a contract to display the eBay Shopping Ads set up on one of my Scottish forums. Traffic on that forum has really fallen off and as a result, I lost the advertising contract. Which means I cannot display those ads on this site either. It was poor planning on my part, but there's no sense crying over spilled milk.
The forums are very healthy in terms of growth and offer a good opportunity for someone to step in with their own advertising contracts and start moving forward again.
I have included a couple of graphs to show what growth has been like, since January 2007. The graph on the left shows the number of unique visits per month, which has grown from 252 to 9,472 in that time period.
In the same period of time, the total hit count has climbed from 9,953 to 2,340,502.
The sale of the forum will include:
Transfer of the owned vBulletin forum software license
Transfer of the GARS license
Transfer of the vBSEO license
Transfer of the domain name - tbucketeers.com
Transfer of the entire database
Transfer of all forum and script files
The vBPicGallery license is one that requires renewal each year. The current license has expired, but all of those files and images will be transferred to the new owner as well. In order to upgrade to the latest version of the gallery software, the annual fee would need to be paid.
As of this morning, Google Analytics indicates a total of 9,894 organic visits from a total of 4,792 search engine keywords. Search engine traffic is a very healthy 46.03% of the site's total traffic.
Google currently has assigned the site a Page Rank of 3, for those that are concerned with that metric. It has been my experience that some of our better traffic months have occured when we were at PR0, so I tend to ignore the number entirely.
The site has been appraised at $6,540 U.S. Dollars. I will take the best offer over $2,500. As you can see, the site is a solid investment.
I am making this available to members of this site first, before considering offers from outside parties. I would like to see the site end up with someone that appreciates what this community represents, rather than selling it to someone that is interested in nothing more than profit potential.
Please understand that if an buyer cannot be found, I will be forced to simply close the site down. That would pain me, as I've invested a considerable amount of time and money here. But I am at a point where I can no longer afford to keep the site operational, beyond 30 June 2009.
Further details will be made available upon request, via Private Message.
This thread has been running in a closed, private forum for several days and many of the forum members involved feel it is best to open this discussion up to all members.
This one may come as a shock to some of you, whilst others are already aware.
I am placing the T-Bucket Forums up for sale. There are a lot of reasons for this decision, not the least of which is the fact that I am simply tired. I've been bashing code for as long as I care to do. There have been some very special changes in my life and I am wanting to spend more time enjoying those blessings.
I don't want anyone to dash to the donations page, because I don't want to extend any of my obligations to anyone. But I've been caught up in a financial crunch. The site grew to a point where I could no longer operate it on an inexpensive hosting plan and we moved to an excellent VPS host about a year ago. We were getting regular donations and we had 4 forum sponsors that were allowing us to keep growing and adding new features. Since the first of the year, we have lost two of our sponsors, donations have dropped to nearly zero and I'm still sitting atop a closet full of t-shirts. I had a contract to display the eBay Shopping Ads set up on one of my Scottish forums. Traffic on that forum has really fallen off and as a result, I lost the advertising contract. Which means I cannot display those ads on this site either. It was poor planning on my part, but there's no sense crying over spilled milk.
The forums are very healthy in terms of growth and offer a good opportunity for someone to step in with their own advertising contracts and start moving forward again.
I have included a couple of graphs to show what growth has been like, since January 2007. The graph on the left shows the number of unique visits per month, which has grown from 252 to 9,472 in that time period.
In the same period of time, the total hit count has climbed from 9,953 to 2,340,502.
The sale of the forum will include:
Transfer of the owned vBulletin forum software license
Transfer of the GARS license
Transfer of the vBSEO license
Transfer of the domain name - tbucketeers.com
Transfer of the entire database
Transfer of all forum and script files
The vBPicGallery license is one that requires renewal each year. The current license has expired, but all of those files and images will be transferred to the new owner as well. In order to upgrade to the latest version of the gallery software, the annual fee would need to be paid.
As of this morning, Google Analytics indicates a total of 9,894 organic visits from a total of 4,792 search engine keywords. Search engine traffic is a very healthy 46.03% of the site's total traffic.
Google currently has assigned the site a Page Rank of 3, for those that are concerned with that metric. It has been my experience that some of our better traffic months have occured when we were at PR0, so I tend to ignore the number entirely.
The site has been appraised at $6,540 U.S. Dollars. I will take the best offer over $2,500. As you can see, the site is a solid investment.
I am making this available to members of this site first, before considering offers from outside parties. I would like to see the site end up with someone that appreciates what this community represents, rather than selling it to someone that is interested in nothing more than profit potential.
Please understand that if an buyer cannot be found, I will be forced to simply close the site down. That would pain me, as I've invested a considerable amount of time and money here. But I am at a point where I can no longer afford to keep the site operational, beyond 30 June 2009.
Further details will be made available upon request, via Private Message.