For Sale

[RexRod]

The biggest hurdle for any INVESTOR to overcome is the feeling of an OWNER. There are differences of opinion on any number of subjects here and if you want to start DICTATING it will fail. This is what I see as some resistance to a user/owner site. Everyone has to subscribe to the don't break it policy, this site works great so don't break it.

Well, then what do we need to do to talk Mike into keeping it going? I know I'm going to be pissed if this place goes away. There are very few online communities as civil. It's a real testament to Mike and his style of doing things.

I guess ideally it would be great if someone here bought it.

I'm done bitching now.

David

 

[Todd]

Well, then what do we need to do to talk Mike into keeping it going? I know I'm going to be pissed if this place goes away. There are very few online communities as civil. It's a real testament to Mike and his style of doing things.

It is also a testament to the way we conduct ourselves. I just wanted to point out that if a group of us buys into it, that we act as we have and not get inflated egos about ownership.

 

[der Spieler]

I think we should sit on this for a couple of months. Mike wants to sell it by 30 June. If he hasn't done anything with it by the first of that month then maybe we should all get together and figure out a strategy and put together an offer. Mike stated he wants the best offer over $2500.

Just a thought; if we end up negotiating to buy the forum I think we will need to come up with the agreed price and an extra sum to put into an account for operating capital. I'm sure Mike has been keeping up with these posts but any response to our thoughts have been interestingly absent. I hope he gets the forum sold and I hope it's to someone who knows and understands our cars. But in the event that doesn't happen we should be ready to do something.

Another thought just came to mind. Mike stated that he's cutting off donations. That means no new donors. How many donor/members are there on this forum? Are there enough of us to even consider making an offer? Donor rules say that what is written here stays here. That means we can't go outside of this platform to recruit investors.

I'm rambling now. Give me your thoughts.

 

[LumenAl]

I'm stunned by all this... this is my favorite site... I think we need to have a better understanding of what it takes to keep this puppy floating in terms of expenses and what kind of time requirements are needed to keep it running...

I have what I believe to be some decent computer skills, but I've never ventured into anything like this so I have no clue of what it takes... I do know that things around my household are very tight... wife lost her job... 6 months of no work before getting new job at 33% less than she was making, and I still have a job but I had to take a 20% pay cut... so to say our budget is stressed is an understatement. Having said that I can commit to $250 towards a fund if we can find a way to purchase it, and have the right people and funding in place doing what needs to be done to run and maintain it... sorry, that's the best I can do right now... I'm also willing to learn anything, but have to be shown or learn what it takes...

 

[der Spieler]

I think we need a list of donors and then find a chat room someplace where we can all get together and discuss this in private. Not to slight Mike but this is a business deal. If we all agree (or a sufficient number of us) to put forward an offer we need to be able to come up with a bargaining strategy. I was thinking somewhere in the area of putting in $100 toward the purchase and another $100 to put into our account for operating expenses. It's easy to set up a Paypal account to handle all of our transactions. We just need to get all of the interested parties together to hash things out.

 

[Mike]

Sorry, but I just haven't been around to keep up on all this.

The site is currently hosted on a Virtual Private Server with KnownHost. I am at work and don't have numbers in front of me, but the monthly expense is a tick over $40 or $41. Figure about $500/annually.

There are currently three licenses that require annual renewal fees - the forum software itself, the vBSEO license and the GARS Article/Review license. If the photo gallery ever requires updating, that license would have to be renewed, as well.

I can post some real numbers, from the house. Donors, amount of donations, expenses, etc. I don't know that will happen tonight or tomorrow, but I will try to get some data posted as soon as I am able.

 

[Martin]

Just posting on this site taxes my computer skills heavily so i'm afraid I cant offer any help running it. I have been throwing in $20 every other month or so and would be glad to continue at that level of donation if someone could keep the forum running.

I think something posted on the open forum would be a good idea also. Got to be at least a few people who would provide some financial support if they knew that the alternative was to lose the forum altogether.

If Ron declines, that means....FRED FOR PRESIDENT!!!!!!!!!
It's the logical next step for our ambassador isn't it?

 

[RocknT]

I wish I had better computer skills ..

 

[tfeverfred]

HOLY SMOKES! This is a shock, but in these times.... well, no need to go into that. I have VERY little comp skills, but I am willing to do my part to keep this site going. Come up with a plan and how much we need to chip in and I'm in.

EDIT: I was here when all we had were 5 members. I really don't wanna move. I'm dug in too deep.

 

[der Spieler]

When Mike gives us the list of donors we need to get in touch with everyone and get everyone together somehow and determine whether or not there is enough interest in buying the forum from him. If there is enough interest then we need to determine a reasonable price to offer that will serve both him and us and how much money we will need to have in an account to cover operating expenses while we grow the forum. There are myriad questions that need to be asked and answered.

 

[putz]

I would be willing to donate to this worthy cause. This site seems to keep out the undesirables. I hate when a site allows someone else to put down someones ideas. Good job in this category Mike.
Putz

 

[Bill Pedersen]

Im in a similar situation as many of you, with more expenses and much less income. This board is the one place I go to relax and forget about any problems I may have. I would hate to see it go away or change. I have made a couple of donations in the past, but would commit to $100-$200 to help keep it going.
Bill

 

[RPM]

It does not look like we will have any trouble getting 10-15 people to put in 100-200 to buy the site.

 

[Mike]

Apologies for being away over the weekend. I had to help my son move on Saturday and church activities kept me busy all day yesterday.

There is a list of everyone that has donated to the forum shown on this page - The T-Bucket Forums - Show Groups

 

[Webmaster]

OK, here are some numbers for you -

Hosting expenses for 2008 - $378.95
License expenses - $293.10
T-shirt expenses - $897.84

Advertising revenue - $638.70
Donations - $788.22
T-shirt sales - $581.00

That left me with a net $438.03 for the year, or $8.42/weekly. Before taxes. By the time I pay the accountant, she comes up leaking oil.

(Since 1 January, we've lost the revenue from the eBay Shopping Ads, we've lost HRK Fabrication's ads and we lost Total Performance's ads. That is a loss of approximately $75-$80 per month.)

Years ago, I had a member of one of my Scottish forums playing Morse code on the Google Adsense ads. Google took exception and dumped me from that program, so I've no hope with them. Judging by the clicks we were getting on the eBay ads, if someone could display Adsense ads on this site, they are likely worth at least $100/month.

Frankly, had I paid closer attention to these numbers, I would have already been outa here.

Here's what a day in the life of a forum admin can be like -

I get a minimum of 12 e-mails each day.

People registering with bogus e-mail addresses that bounce the forum's confirmation e-mails.

People registering that agree to follow the printed rules and miss the warning about their Yahoo address not being acceptable. They then plug their Yahoo address in, directly under the second warning about it not being acceptable. After that, they e-mail me to complain they cannot register. Some of them like to read me their own version of the riot act, for not making it more clear. One idiot refused to use any other e-mail address and accused me of discrimination. He promised me he would be sure to post on every site he could that I discriminate. Like the idiot couldn't read our Terms of Service???

I've had a couple of problem children that felt I was supposed to be holding their hands for them, so that generated e-mails as well. One had computer issues and spent a week railing at me about how the forum software was broken. He would e-mail me and cuss at me about how my forum was a piece of sh*t and I was being a pr*ck for not wanting to help him with HIS issues. And then he would always close his e-mails by telling me what a nice guy he is. Aye. Right. This was the same idiot that registered here with his NTBA username and then wanted it changed so nobody here would know who he was. Then he wanted it changed back, about 6 months later.

I cannot begin to count the e-mails where people have told me how much better this forum would be if I made it just like the NTBA forum. Or the e-mails where I've been told I need to use the same rules and TOS as the NTBA site.

If you really want to stay atop everything that goes on around here and put out every single fire, figure 90 minutes each day. Minimum.

Now we move onto adding and upgrading the software the site runs on.

In 2008, there were 7 upgrades to the vBulletin software. One of which required major re-writes of about 19 templates and the upgrading of two of the forum styles.

The GARS Article & Review script was upgraded 4 times

The portal software was upgraded 3 times

I installed vBSEO and then upgraded it 3 times.

The script that accelerates the page loads was installed and upgraded 3 times.

The script that handles the display of videos within the posts was installed.

To give you an idea of what I charge to do these things (I also do freelance vBulletin forum work), just these upgrades and installations would cost one of my customers $345. The time I spent re-writing the forum templates would have been billed at $50/hour and I suspect I have between 4 and 5 hours in all those upgrades, so bring that total up to $545, at minimum.

I have one customer that pays me to admin his site and I give him a total of 8 hours per month for $300.

Suddenly that $8.42/week I managed to pull down is looking pretty lame, isn't it?

If you're looking to operate a forum, it has to be a labor of love for you, otherwise you will never consider it. And after a handful of real arseholes gave me a few good cussings, I've decided I just don't love it so much any more.

The greatest majority of members are really great people. And I appreciate each one of you donating as you have. For the biggest part, the moderators don't have much to do around here, because everyone plays well with others. That is a real blessing, because there is a lot of things going on in the back room so that I don't have much time for moderating.

So there you have it. Raw and with no sugar-coating. If someone can come in clean and insert some Google Adsense ads, they have a really good shot at making some money. Otherwise, it is going to require a dedicated effort on behalf of the membership to keep the ship afloat.

Some people have mentioned using a subscription method. If you subscribe to the forums, you can participate, otherwise you cannot. The bug in that ointment is that if you close off the forums to visitors, that means the search engines cannot crawl the site. Which means people trying to search for the site won't be able to find it by using the search engines. So new membership would suffer. Catch 22.

My freelance work is suffering because of the rotten economy. My day job is threatening to go away, for the same reason. Add that into the loss of revenue from this site and this place is no longer a viable option for me.

After losing my Dad a few weeks back, my son and I have managed to improve our relationship and I'm getting to spend more time with him, his girlfriend and my granddaughter. After being divorced nearly ten years, I've met a super lady that I enjoy spending time with. And I can't spend time with any of them if I'm sitting in here trying to run a forum that is growing out of control and failing to support itself.

So for anyone that still wants to step up to the plate and purchase this site, don't say I didn't give you fair warning.

 

[der Spieler]

Geez.....I wish you hadn't sugarcoated it. I know we have enough people who want to contribute to buy the forum but I'm not sure we have any people with the expertise to administer it or would be silling to give the time to it. I think any of us, with time, could learn the ins and outs. I'm anxious to hear the responses to your post.
In fact, I would like it if the responders would also email me directly with their thoughts. I don't want the forum to go away but it appears that might be the case. Let's see what happens.

 

[RexRod]

Hey everybody,

I've got an interesting idea on how to raise money for the site (for whoever owns it in the future).

I've noticed that some folks on the site are very generously donating a lot of time scanning articles and sharing them with everyone. What if we collected all articles and info in one place and burn it all to a CD or DVD. Then for some small amount like 10 bucks we could sell it, with the proceeds going to run the site. I would be willing to bet the cost to make the disc would be less than a buck.

Some of the things on the disc could be build articles, useful info like brake or electrical diagrams, pictures of cars to help people get ideas, etc. Sort of a clearing house of info on the T-Bucket. We could put out a call to all members to cough up what they know and collect it for distribution.

I know as soon as we start selling this info it might open some doors of copyright infringement, but if the money is used solely to support the site (non-profit), it might seem less harmful to the powers that be.

Just thinking out loud.

David

P.S. If this idea has already been brought up, just disregard.

 

[der Spieler]

Your idea is a good one, David. But rather than sell the CD and possibly run into copyright issues (copyrights are forever) we could give them to dues paying members. There was a suggestion in an earlier post about making the forum a pay site. I would suggest that we continue to make it open to the public but, much like the donor’s forum is available only to those of us who have made donations, make an area of the site available only to paying members, like the technical forum. I think someone suggested a fee of $25 a year.

Several members have said they would put in money to buy the forum. We could make the donor’s forum the owner’s forum to post information of interest to the owners; P&Ls, reports on sponsorship hunts, etc.

I have told a couple of people that I could be coerced into administrating the forum. I have a friend here who is the IT guy at the manufacturing company where I used to work. I think he would gladly help me get started. There might be a fee for any consulting later but that would be negotiable. I am retired so I should have a lot of time free to devote to the forum. I do play golf a couple of times a week, I will be starting on my build in May or June and I will be doing some travelling this year. Still, there are a lot of hours in the day when I am home.

I wouldn’t run the show by myself. I would need someone to handle the financials and someone to actively seek sponsors. I would like to see Speedway fill the void left by TP’s departure. We will also need someone to handle T-shirt sales with the idea of maybe expanding T-Bucketeers items; decals, coffee mugs, koozies, etc. At first I thought this might be a loser but maybe not. It’s something to talk about.

I did a quick search at Legalzoom.com to see if they offered a program to set up a non-profit. They do but I didn’t dig any deeper to figure out costs or if we could even qualify. Mike has been running this as a business and taxes have had to be paid. We don’t need that.

That’s it. If all of the people who have said that they would be interested in becoming an owner comes through with their $100-$200 investment money we should be able to come up with enough to buy the forum. I have reached out twice on this thread for people to contact me so that we can discuss this. Two people, so far, have written. We can either take the bull by the horns and do something or we can sit back and watch the forum wither and die. Mike could end up getting the forum sold anyway but we have no guarantees that will happen. Mike will accept the best offer over $2500. We should raise at least that much plus another few hundred to cover operating expenses until things settle down and operations return to something that resembles normal.

Unless I hear from the masses this will be my last posting on this topic. We have a special place here and it would be a shame to see it go away. Sitting on our thumbs and hoping that things will sort themselves out will probably end in disappointment. Mike wants the forum sold by the end of June. I think we should all get together and determine what we can raise and, if we have enough to make an offer, make that offer and plan on finalizing everything by mid-June. What say you?

 

[Mike]

Steve is right about the copyright issues. That's a really good way to end up with a pack of problems.

I know my accountant has considered changing everything over to a not-for-profit status, but I've no idea why it never happened.

I really think the idea of several people pooling money is one that will not come to be. I talked to a lot of members about the t-shirts before I ordered any of them. I actually bumped the order up by a couple dozen, just to make sure I would have enough of them to fill the orders. When it came time for the rubber to hit the road, everyone suddenly changed their minds. And I still have over 3 dozen shirts on hand. I grit my teeth every time I walk past the closet and realize there is some $600 laying there.

My experience with groups is that the 10% rule is always in effect. If you have 20 people interested in doing something, you will end up with 2 actually participating. And when you're talking about money, things can get expensive pretty quickly.

I'll leave this go a few more days and if something doesn't start coming together, I'll start examining my other options.

 

[RPM]

Well I for one would really hate to see this site go down, as you can imagine it has been good to me. I am ready to send the money to get this thing rolling, to keep it afloat.

Looks like we have a volunteer to run things. I am fine with that. :beer: