I'm jus' sayin'
- Thread starter Mike
- Start date
as soon as it gets here ill pitch in
trikerchewie
Member
added a few drops to the bucket. hope it helps
I would hate to lose this site at this point in my build, but I aint rich so yall gotta help too
Mike
Well-Known Member
We took in $160 ($110 short) in September and $140 ($130 short) in October. <shrug> Times are tough and everyone has to do what they have to do. We've enough left in savings to cover expenses through January, so we're not going anywhere tomorrow. February will be a rather different story, but it is what it is. I'm not really losing any sleep over what might happen, one way or another. If we go bust, we go bust. We just need to remember, this is an Internet discussion site and those are coming and going every day. Two years ago, I would have been frantically wringing my hands, worried the site might be lost. Today, I'm just going with the flow. If we earn enough to survive, then we will keep plugging along. If we end up running aground, all we're really going to be out is a Web site. It's not like we will be losing our health, homes or families, aye? Life will go on.
I keep thinking it would be ethical for me to simply disable the Donations Manager. I do not see it as being fair to accept donations for a site that might well be in its death throes. But if I do disable that script, it will most certainly seal our fate. A bit of a Catch-22, actually. So I do ask that you keep all this in mind when considering future donations.
Be for you hit that point of no return Mike lets try a 1 years subscription to the site. Then you can go from there. You can start taking subscriptions now to get a feel for the first of the year where your at for the site. I don't think your asking a lot from us to keep this site up when we are the ones using it. I do like the help that everybody gives here for us new bees . To make this short Some will go and Some will stay
fordsbyjay
Active Member
Just make it a pay site. There is only maybe 1/10th of the members actually supporting the site anyways so who cares about the freeloaders. Sorry to sound harsh but I don't pay for any forum I go to but this one and I am getting tired of pitching in every few months when the site is going to close again.. To me if you can afford a hot rod you can afford $3/month because that is about all it would take if everyone pitched in. 
bigfrank330
Member
Make it a subscription site
I would pay for a year's worth at a time
The number of 3.00 a month has been thrown around
BUT
Several people won't go for that so make it 10.00 a month
Pay every 6 months and go from there
Here is my 6 month's worth
Frank
I would pay for a year's worth at a time
The number of 3.00 a month has been thrown around
BUT
Several people won't go for that so make it 10.00 a month
Pay every 6 months and go from there
Here is my 6 month's worth
Frank
jmr122848
Member
Look, the point is Rodders helping rodders. a Pay site will be limited on how many voices are available. we need everybody. we need members to add to the Tbucket gumbo. If only those who can and will contribute moneterily are on the site we may lose voices and experiece and fellowship that is the purpose of the site. I try, you try. let's not muck up a good thing.
Gerry
Well-Known Member
Im going to be really honest with you all. I only post to this site on the odd occasion now, but used to post almost every day.
I got fed up with the constant threat of closure so found somewhere else that was more 'stable' that was just as good and entertaining as this one.
In saying that I would be more than happy to 'donate' 36 bucks for a years 'subscription' if it means keeping it alive and well.
Gerry
I got fed up with the constant threat of closure so found somewhere else that was more 'stable' that was just as good and entertaining as this one.
In saying that I would be more than happy to 'donate' 36 bucks for a years 'subscription' if it means keeping it alive and well.
Gerry
Mike
Well-Known Member
There are some really valuable comments and suggestions here, so I want to take a few minutes to address all of them.
Gerry, I understand you being fed up with the constant threat of closure. But let me tell you, I get pretty tired of it, as well. Again, as I've made very clear, time and again, if this site was made up of fewer than 125 members, I would gladly be operating it on a freebie hosting site, myself. I am perfectly aware both you and Corley think all forum sites can be run for $6.95/year, but that just isn't the case. And to be quite frank with you (without trying to be as nasty as Corley wants to make me out to be, BTW
) this site has taken on more new members since July than your copycat site has taken on since May 2011. I just visited your site and see you have taken on 3324 posts in the 18 months of its existence. I congratulate you on that milestone, because I well and truly know how hard it can be to get a site up and running. But we've taken on 3324 new posts since 23 July of this year. If I go back 18 months, to the time when Corley spat the dummy, my records indicate this site has swelled to the tune of 20,000+ posts and 680+ members. Again, I am not trying to slam you for your efforts, but I do hope you can now see those efforts did little else but dilute the audience, rather than actually providing any kind of a reasonable alternative solution. I started this site on $6.95/month hosting and would love nothing better than to be able to continue running on those kinds of resources, because there would never be a threat of closure. I've little doubt you are going to take offense at these comments (which I genuinely do not want), but it wasn't me to open that particular door, aye? When this joint starts averaging under 7 new members a month and fewer than 185 posts a month, I'll start using the same freebie host you are using. Until then, I'll need to keep using real resources, which cost real dollars. Comparing the site you and Corley are running to this one is a little like comparing a Gulfstream to a folded, paper airplane. They both fly, but that's where common points end.
Dino, fordsbyjay and Frank have what seems to be a simple solution. And I appreciate the fact they are all thinking about alternative solutions, because I'm not so close-minded as to think I have all the answers.
But there are some very valid reasons why restricting the site to subscription-only would be counter-productive. Allow me to explain.
As with any Web site, new users (visitors, guests, whatever you want to call them) find this site via 3 methods. They find a link to this site on another site and follow it here. They hear one of you talking about this site and learn about it that way. Or, they do a search on Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. and find the site that way. Of late, over 63% of new visitors to this site are arriving here after performing searches on Google. Since Google is the big dog of search engines, I will focus on them alone, but this same principal holds true for all search engines.
Google runs robot scripts that do nothing but crawl the Web. The Googlebot script will land on a Web site and start scanning the page it has landed on, looking for keywords on the page. I've seen Googlebot jump onto a page and jump right back off, within seconds. I've also seen Googlebot hit a page and end up spending hours on the site, moving from page to page. Obviously, the number one keyword on this site is T-Bucket. When Googlebot lands here and starts 'reading', it quickly sees that is a primary keyword, so when it starts building indexing, it notes that this site is an 'authority' for T-Bucket. So, when people start doing searches on the term 'T-Bucket', this site ranks very well for the phrase. As of 8:00 AM, this morning, when I recorded the data for the site, a Google search on T-Bucket returned 69,900,000 results. Of those 69 million results, this site ranks 5th. I am never satisfied with being 4th loser, but the bottom line is that we are ranking very well. I found Corley and Gerry's site back on page 5, ranking at 49th. My favorite sockpuppet's site is buried back on page 10, ranking 95th.
That doesn't seem like much, but when I was still doing SEO contract work, the company I was contracted to did a large-scale poll. When 100 of you do a Google search, only 14 or 15 of you will ever bother going back as far as page 2 in the search results. 85 or 86 of you either find what you want on page 1, or you try a different search phrase. But it gets even more interesting than that. Of those 85 or 86 of you who never see page 2, fewer than 15 (!!!) of you will ever scroll down below the fold! See below -
I run this particular machine at a resolution of 1680 X 1050, and look what site is barely peeking its head up above the fold. If I were just a John Q. Google-Searcher, what T-bucket forum site am I going to find from my basic search? Hint - it's not going to be Corley and Gerry's site, nor is it going to be the sockpuppet's site.
To come back to the idea of making this a restricted site - what everyone needs to understand is that Google (or any other search engine, for that matter) can only see what an unregistered guest can see. There are some things happening on this site that the majority of our users never see.
Most unregistered guests think the How Do I... forum is at the bottom of the stack. Logged-in members see the Computer Issues forum. But there are three forum categories below that, consisting of 9 additional forums. One is dormant and has never been used, one is set aside for the donating members, one is set aside for the forum sponsors, 5 are for use of the forum staff and there's even one there the moderators cannot see.
Since search engine robots cannot log into the forums, those last 10 forums are unknown to them. They cannot crawl those pages and as a result, cannot add any of those pages to the index. None of the information in those 10 forums can be searched on any search engines.
So, if I restrict access to this site and only allow subscribers to see the forums, that takes all our amassed data back out of the Google search results and people are not going to be able to find us as easily. Corley, Gerry and the sockpuppet would really like to see that happen, because that would take their primary competition out of the picture. But, as I said before, it would also remove over 60% of the traffic to this site. That's a hit we could not survive.
I carefully record several metrics, on a daily basis, to monitor how well this site is performing. Obviously, the raw numbers are proprietary, but here is a graphical representation of the monthly traffic this site has seen, thus far in 2012. With a projection for what this month would be like, if we only saw 40% of October's traffic, this month.
If February had consisted of at least 30 days, that graph point would have indicated an increase, rather than a decrease. I still have no explanation for what happened in June, it was as if the bottom dropped out for that month. It certainly had my attention, even though the summer months are generally our slower months. But look what would happen this month, if I were to close down the site. Talk about the bottom falling out.
I just went back through my statistical data and the last time we had traffic numbers that low was four years ago, in November 2008.
Losing that much traffic would be a hit from which we would likely never recover.
Now, let's talk about the actual operational costs.
Annual hosting expense - $3348.00
Annual domain expense - $29.93
Annual license renewals - $70.00
My trusty calculator makes that to be a total of $3447.93. If I divide that number by 12, to get a monthly total, that amount is $287.33/month. This is where I remember Corley telling everyone how I was getting rich from the donations to this site. Yeah, the donations come in at $17.33 short of the monthly expenses, so I'm damn sure getting fat on that loss, aye?
I'm not sure what Corley majored in, whilst in school, but basic mathematics wasn't hie strong suit.
Now, let's look at what annual subscription costs would really look like. As of this post, we have a total of 3,106 members. At that number, if each member would pony up $1.11 / 69p a year, we would be able to cover the current expenses. Seems simple, doesn't it? Until you realize that we regularly get new members registering, only to never log back into their forum accounts, ever again. We are currently averaging 125 different members logging into the site, every day. If we were to use that number, suddenly the subscription cost rises to $27.58 / £17.22 a year. Suddenly, I'm liking the sound of that $3/month subscription number.
But hold the phone, because over the course of the last year, only 78 different members have donated to the site. Which means if I charge $36/year for subscriptions and only 78 people decide to subscribe, that will only be $234/month, well shy of the actual $287.33 required to keep the place alive and breathing. Suddenly, that $3/month subscription isn't enough and the site will be restricted to just 78 of our total members. How'zat going to work out? At that number, the subscription rate would have to climb to something in the $45/year range. What's that do for the donating members who can only afford to donate $5 - $20 each year? See how we would be chasing people away?
As easy as it sounds to just restrict site access to subscribing members, it would have some immediate and negative impact on the site. In one month's time, I would effectively be undoing the last 72 months of effort, trying to get this place to where it is, today.
There are some other factors, of which only a small handful of you are aware, that are figuring into this delightful mess. I'll list them in a subsequent post, since they really have naught to do with the financial aspects of the site.
Gerry, I understand you being fed up with the constant threat of closure. But let me tell you, I get pretty tired of it, as well. Again, as I've made very clear, time and again, if this site was made up of fewer than 125 members, I would gladly be operating it on a freebie hosting site, myself. I am perfectly aware both you and Corley think all forum sites can be run for $6.95/year, but that just isn't the case. And to be quite frank with you (without trying to be as nasty as Corley wants to make me out to be, BTW
) this site has taken on more new members since July than your copycat site has taken on since May 2011. I just visited your site and see you have taken on 3324 posts in the 18 months of its existence. I congratulate you on that milestone, because I well and truly know how hard it can be to get a site up and running. But we've taken on 3324 new posts since 23 July of this year. If I go back 18 months, to the time when Corley spat the dummy, my records indicate this site has swelled to the tune of 20,000+ posts and 680+ members. Again, I am not trying to slam you for your efforts, but I do hope you can now see those efforts did little else but dilute the audience, rather than actually providing any kind of a reasonable alternative solution. I started this site on $6.95/month hosting and would love nothing better than to be able to continue running on those kinds of resources, because there would never be a threat of closure. I've little doubt you are going to take offense at these comments (which I genuinely do not want), but it wasn't me to open that particular door, aye? When this joint starts averaging under 7 new members a month and fewer than 185 posts a month, I'll start using the same freebie host you are using. Until then, I'll need to keep using real resources, which cost real dollars. Comparing the site you and Corley are running to this one is a little like comparing a Gulfstream to a folded, paper airplane. They both fly, but that's where common points end.Dino, fordsbyjay and Frank have what seems to be a simple solution. And I appreciate the fact they are all thinking about alternative solutions, because I'm not so close-minded as to think I have all the answers.
But there are some very valid reasons why restricting the site to subscription-only would be counter-productive. Allow me to explain.As with any Web site, new users (visitors, guests, whatever you want to call them) find this site via 3 methods. They find a link to this site on another site and follow it here. They hear one of you talking about this site and learn about it that way. Or, they do a search on Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. and find the site that way. Of late, over 63% of new visitors to this site are arriving here after performing searches on Google. Since Google is the big dog of search engines, I will focus on them alone, but this same principal holds true for all search engines.
Google runs robot scripts that do nothing but crawl the Web. The Googlebot script will land on a Web site and start scanning the page it has landed on, looking for keywords on the page. I've seen Googlebot jump onto a page and jump right back off, within seconds. I've also seen Googlebot hit a page and end up spending hours on the site, moving from page to page. Obviously, the number one keyword on this site is T-Bucket. When Googlebot lands here and starts 'reading', it quickly sees that is a primary keyword, so when it starts building indexing, it notes that this site is an 'authority' for T-Bucket. So, when people start doing searches on the term 'T-Bucket', this site ranks very well for the phrase. As of 8:00 AM, this morning, when I recorded the data for the site, a Google search on T-Bucket returned 69,900,000 results. Of those 69 million results, this site ranks 5th. I am never satisfied with being 4th loser
, but the bottom line is that we are ranking very well. I found Corley and Gerry's site back on page 5, ranking at 49th. My favorite sockpuppet's site is buried back on page 10, ranking 95th.That doesn't seem like much, but when I was still doing SEO contract work, the company I was contracted to did a large-scale poll. When 100 of you do a Google search, only 14 or 15 of you will ever bother going back as far as page 2 in the search results. 85 or 86 of you either find what you want on page 1, or you try a different search phrase. But it gets even more interesting than that. Of those 85 or 86 of you who never see page 2, fewer than 15 (!!!) of you will ever scroll down below the fold! See below -
I run this particular machine at a resolution of 1680 X 1050, and look what site is barely peeking its head up above the fold. If I were just a John Q. Google-Searcher, what T-bucket forum site am I going to find from my basic search? Hint - it's not going to be Corley and Gerry's site, nor is it going to be the sockpuppet's site.
To come back to the idea of making this a restricted site - what everyone needs to understand is that Google (or any other search engine, for that matter) can only see what an unregistered guest can see. There are some things happening on this site that the majority of our users never see.
Most unregistered guests think the How Do I... forum is at the bottom of the stack. Logged-in members see the Computer Issues forum. But there are three forum categories below that, consisting of 9 additional forums. One is dormant and has never been used, one is set aside for the donating members, one is set aside for the forum sponsors, 5 are for use of the forum staff and there's even one there the moderators cannot see.
Since search engine robots cannot log into the forums, those last 10 forums are unknown to them. They cannot crawl those pages and as a result, cannot add any of those pages to the index. None of the information in those 10 forums can be searched on any search engines.
So, if I restrict access to this site and only allow subscribers to see the forums, that takes all our amassed data back out of the Google search results and people are not going to be able to find us as easily. Corley, Gerry and the sockpuppet would really like to see that happen, because that would take their primary competition out of the picture. But, as I said before, it would also remove over 60% of the traffic to this site. That's a hit we could not survive.
I carefully record several metrics, on a daily basis, to monitor how well this site is performing. Obviously, the raw numbers are proprietary, but here is a graphical representation of the monthly traffic this site has seen, thus far in 2012. With a projection for what this month would be like, if we only saw 40% of October's traffic, this month.
If February had consisted of at least 30 days, that graph point would have indicated an increase, rather than a decrease. I still have no explanation for what happened in June, it was as if the bottom dropped out for that month. It certainly had my attention, even though the summer months are generally our slower months. But look what would happen this month, if I were to close down the site. Talk about the bottom falling out.
I just went back through my statistical data and the last time we had traffic numbers that low was four years ago, in November 2008.Losing that much traffic would be a hit from which we would likely never recover.
Now, let's talk about the actual operational costs.
Annual hosting expense - $3348.00
Annual domain expense - $29.93
Annual license renewals - $70.00
My trusty calculator makes that to be a total of $3447.93. If I divide that number by 12, to get a monthly total, that amount is $287.33/month. This is where I remember Corley telling everyone how I was getting rich from the donations to this site. Yeah, the donations come in at $17.33 short of the monthly expenses, so I'm damn sure getting fat on that loss, aye?
I'm not sure what Corley majored in, whilst in school, but basic mathematics wasn't hie strong suit.Now, let's look at what annual subscription costs would really look like. As of this post, we have a total of 3,106 members. At that number, if each member would pony up $1.11 / 69p a year, we would be able to cover the current expenses. Seems simple, doesn't it? Until you realize that we regularly get new members registering, only to never log back into their forum accounts, ever again. We are currently averaging 125 different members logging into the site, every day. If we were to use that number, suddenly the subscription cost rises to $27.58 / £17.22 a year. Suddenly, I'm liking the sound of that $3/month subscription number.
But hold the phone, because over the course of the last year, only 78 different members have donated to the site. Which means if I charge $36/year for subscriptions and only 78 people decide to subscribe, that will only be $234/month, well shy of the actual $287.33 required to keep the place alive and breathing. Suddenly, that $3/month subscription isn't enough and the site will be restricted to just 78 of our total members. How'zat going to work out? At that number, the subscription rate would have to climb to something in the $45/year range. What's that do for the donating members who can only afford to donate $5 - $20 each year? See how we would be chasing people away?As easy as it sounds to just restrict site access to subscribing members, it would have some immediate and negative impact on the site. In one month's time, I would effectively be undoing the last 72 months of effort, trying to get this place to where it is, today.
There are some other factors, of which only a small handful of you are aware, that are figuring into this delightful mess. I'll list them in a subsequent post, since they really have naught to do with the financial aspects of the site.
Mike
Well-Known Member
Since our less-than-reliable donation manager is on the fritz again, after another 'upgrade' from the less-than-reliable developer, several members have asked me to keep a running tally of our current donations on the forums, so everyone can keep track of where we are for the month.
I have received donations from Bennett, Don'tCallMeJimmy, jimbo01, Dino and Flatsman, thus far this month. These donations total $85.00. So we are currently at 31% of the goal for December.
I think (OK, I am actually quite confident) I have left the donation manager developers knickers in a knot, so now it seems he is going to take an attitude with me. I mean, come on, how wrong is it for me to pay for a license to run his script, and then actually expect the flippin' thing should actually work? How arrogant and demanding can I possibly get, aye?
I have received donations from Bennett, Don'tCallMeJimmy, jimbo01, Dino and Flatsman, thus far this month. These donations total $85.00. So we are currently at 31% of the goal for December.
I think (OK, I am actually quite confident) I have left the donation manager developers knickers in a knot, so now it seems he is going to take an attitude with me. I mean, come on, how wrong is it for me to pay for a license to run his script, and then actually expect the flippin' thing should actually work? How arrogant and demanding can I possibly get, aye?
Mike
Well-Known Member
If it was a while back, the donation would have gone to a company called Aztech Consulting, here in Indiana. Actually, Aztech was right here, in this very room.
Your do not need to have a PayPal account to make donations/payments. You can use a debit or credit card without registering an account. If you prefer not to use a card, I certainly understand, as we cannot ever make ourselves completely safe whilst online. But please do not pitch a shoe when I say I will only accept cashier's checks, money orders or e-checks.
The sockpuppet tried to say I was doubting the integrity of his bank account, when I explained that policy to him, but it is really just simple math. I have received several bad checks from members of this site, and when my own bank tried running a bad check and it bounces, I get charged a service fee. If someone sends me a bad check, I end up losing the amount of the check, as a donation, plus I lose a $10 service fee. It's lose-lose, all the way around. I always say the bank and I have an arrangement - I do not cash checks and they do not run discussion forums.
If you want a mailing address, let me know and I will send it to you via Personal Conversation.
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