Raising funds - how should we?

GavRichList

How many members are on here? Charge a £1 sign up fee (or continuation fee for those here). Nobody would bat an eyelid. There must be thousands signed up. 

speshul91

I'd pay a membership fee to keep things running. 

digitalscream

ourmaninthenorth said:

Then not really irrelevant if the implementation of future plans rely on a quantification of current funding. Entirely relevant one would have thought? 

Keeping the lights on is obviously the primary focus, maybe a re-think and consolidation of that, before any expansionary thoughts?  

That's just it - the way the forum content and traffic is heading, we need ever-more capacity. Year on year, that just grows and it's kind of hard to predict when we'll hit the tipping points that require either a direct upgrade, further optimisation (we've done a lot of that) or an architecture re-think. Last year the hosting environment cost nearly three times that of the first year - however, next year it could grow significantly because we might need to add another server in order to keep up. Then there are the features we want to add, which will absolutely require us to charge for them...but we'd have to charge on a future-cost basis.

There's another reason I'm not saying exactly how much it cost - last time I did that, we had a glut of people messaging us saying "Hey, we can do it cheaper" or "I could add it to my ISP's free hosting, that'd solve your problem!" and then arguing with me when I suggested that their solutions were inadequate, and yes I know their cousin fixes computers for people and he reckons he could do it with a laptop and a broadband connection, but this is what I've done for a living for the last 15 years and yes, we've looked at all the alternatives etc etc. It actually cost me more in time trying to explain it all to people than the hosting cost us in a whole year.

I've no doubt we'll release the figures at some point, but we'd want to do it in a more controlled fashion than blurting it out in a thread like this and inviting a slew of people who think they can do it better; genuinely no offence intended by that - I know everyone wants to help, but any change of environment would be a major decision and effort, and we wouldn't be with the current company if they weren't already the best combination of price, performance and reliability...remember, we've only had something like 3 hours of unplanned downtime in over three years, and this is a site with over 3 million hits a month.

EDIT: That's basically 4-9s availability (99.99%) - most businesses would kill to get that kind of availability.

thomasross20

Yeah - £1 minimum per annum per member... do-able via PayPal... there must be thousands of people on here? 

ourmaninthenorth

GavRichList said:

How many members are on here? Charge a £1 sign up fee (or continuation fee for those here). Nobody would bat an eyelid. There must be thousands signed up. 

And watch those numbers become easier to count once it begins to cost everyone of them something to be here. 

Lets deal in reality, huge numbers signed up, a much smaller phalanx of regular contributors..tapping into the willingness of those to get their hands in their pockets, and attracting new members willing to make a financial commitment off the bat is the real conundrum here for the owners, and the sustainability of this Forum. 

We need £7000 grand a year divided by the phallanx = individual net contribution (ignoring the new joiners) 

 i.e 500 members at £14 a year each.

Sounds easy..it's not. 

digitalscream

paul_c2 said:

Ok put it another way: whats the 1) "have to pay" costs and the 2) "want to do" costs? We need some kind of idea how much it costs.

See above, re: the architecture etc - we don't actually know at this point, because we're looking at it on an annual basis (which is how we pay for it all). We pay for the hosting in USD, for a start, and that's already rocketed our costs by 20% with more to come; that being said, even if GBP went below parity with USD and costs went up by another 20%, we'd still be with the hosting company with the best price/feature/performance ratios.

paul_c2 said:

And, if your hourly rate is such that £100 of funding in, costs you £200, then you need to recognise that the £200 figure isn't a "real" one (since you didn't actually charge it, and take the money from website funds??) or that there's better/more efficient ways to do things.

That's the cross that we, as the admins, have to bear; we don't charge the forum for our time because if we did (and even if we gave the first year gratis) the lights would've been off pretty much immediately

That's not to say that it wouldn't be nice if we could get some of that back over time (I don't think that'd be unreasonable), but that time is currently a long way off.

GavRichList

ourmaninthenorth said:

GavRichList said:

How many members are on here? Charge a £1 sign up fee (or continuation fee for those here). Nobody would bat an eyelid. There must be thousands signed up. 

And watch those numbers become easier to count once it begins to cost everyone of them something to be here. 

Lets deal in reality, huge numbers signed up, a much smaller phalanx of regular contributors..tapping into the willingness of those to get their hands in their pockets, and attracting new members willing to make a financial commitment off the bat is the real conundrum here for the owners, and the sustainability of this Forum. 

We need £7000 grand a year divided by the phallanx = individual net contribution (ignoring the new joiners) 

 i.e 500 members at £14 a year each.

Sounds easy..it's not. 

Hmmm. Ok, then a quid for a classified ad seems more viable. Again, can't see anyone protesting too much. 

Nomad

If the forum is running on a dedicated server (and I suspect it is), then you're likely looking at hosting costs of at least 100 quid a month. Example (from the company I use for my somewhat cheaper shared hosting stuff)...

https://www.ukdedicated.com/servers

About £1500 to £4500 a year on those prices.

digitalscream

Nomad said:

If the forum is running on a dedicated server (and I suspect it is), then you're likely looking at hosting costs of at least 100 quid a month. Example (from the company I use for my somewhat cheaper shared hosting stuff)...

https://www.ukdedicated.com/servers

About £1500 to £4500 a year on those prices.

Actually, no - we use a cloud-based service, because then we're not reliant on a single piece of hardware (they have so much redundancy built in that we could never afford) and we can upgrade whenever we want (funds permitting, natch) at the click of a button. Performance is very important, but availability is even more important.

It's also a lot less than that, but equally it ain't your £10/month stuff either.

EDIT: Ahhh, fuck it...if it stops the speculation...the server is part of my environment (I host stuff for other people, and have a number of servers running). That environment costs me a bit less than £1000/year. The resources are somewhat fluid, though, so pinning down exactly what The Fretboard is using is a) time-consuming, and b) best done with guesswork. At any given time, the forum accounts for around 60-70% of the load and resource usage, but I haven't been charging the forum the full whack of that in the interests of conserving our cash reserves for the time when I can no longer support it (which is rapidly approaching).

Emp_Fab

ourmaninthenorth said:

 i.e 500 members at £14 a year each.

Sounds easy..it's not. 

And what about my coke habit ?  You're not seriously suggesting that £14 a year will cover the forum costs and the moderator coke bucket are you ?!


He did WHAT ? - That motherf****** bumped his Goldtop ad twice in one day ???

JookyChap

I think we need to get away from the idea that this is just about hosting though, don't we? It is more about finding a way for it to be secure/stable/viable for years to come.

What would the feeling be about sponsorship, if a sponsor could cover costs/further development, for naming rights or some such thing?

JookyChap

And the coke, clearly

digitalscream

JookyChap said:

I think we need to get away from the idea that this is just about hosting though, don't we? It is more about finding a way for it to be secure/stable/viable for years to come.

What would the feeling be about sponsorship, if a sponsor could cover costs/further development, for naming rights or some such thing?

What sort of "naming rights" popped into your head? I'm guessing most sponsors wouldn't consider it a good deal if they got to name Emp's man parts.

The problem with sponsors is that they tend to expect certain things as a baseline - like, for example, moderation based on people not slagging them off. That's kind of this place's stock-in-trade, which might make such relationships a little...tense.

thomasross20

I remember intermusic awesome, then it became MusicRadar with associated sponsors and that was pants, sorry to say.

Roland

digitalscream said:

We're genuinely not being cagey here - it's kind of hard to pin down, and somewhat irrelevant. There are things we've got planned for the next 12 months which will (potentially) ramp up the cost quite a bit, but also potentially pull money in. How we go about those things will kinda depend on how much money we've got.

Chicken, meet egg.

Sounds like we need to distill out a couple of options, not necessarily for publication, and get ballpark costs for them. Then we can tell people the magnitude of what funds are needed.

The donation route sounds attractive, but it's a subset of the regular users who would be able to contribute significant money.

ourmaninthenorth

digitalscream said:

ourmaninthenorth said:

Then not really irrelevant if the implementation of future plans rely on a quantification of current funding. Entirely relevant one would have thought? 

Keeping the lights on is obviously the primary focus, maybe a re-think and consolidation of that, before any expansionary thoughts?  

That's just it - the way the forum content and traffic is heading, we need ever-more capacity. Year on year, that just grows and it's kind of hard to predict when we'll hit the tipping points that require either a direct upgrade, further optimisation (we've done a lot of that) or an architecture re-think. Last year the hosting environment cost nearly three times that of the first year - however, next year it could grow significantly because we might need to add another server in order to keep up. Then there are the features we want to add, which will absolutely require us to charge for them...but we'd have to charge on a future-cost basis.

There's another reason I'm not saying exactly how much it cost - last time I did that, we had a glut of people messaging us saying "Hey, we can do it cheaper" or "I could add it to my ISP's free hosting, that'd solve your problem!" and then arguing with me when I suggested that their solutions were inadequate, and yes I know their cousin fixes computers for people and he reckons he could do it with a laptop and a broadband connection, but this is what I've done for a living for the last 15 years and yes, we've looked at all the alternatives etc etc. It actually cost me more in time trying to explain it all to people than the hosting cost us in a whole year.

I've no doubt we'll release the figures at some point, but we'd want to do it in a more controlled fashion than blurting it out in a thread like this and inviting a slew of people who think they can do it better; genuinely no offence intended by that - I know everyone wants to help, but any change of environment would be a major decision and effort, and we wouldn't be with the current company if they weren't already the best combination of price, performance and reliability...remember, we've only had something like 3 hours of unplanned downtime in over three years, and this is a site with over 3 million hits a month.

EDIT: That's basically 4-9s availability (99.99%) - most businesses would kill to get that kind of availability.

Thanks for that @digitalscream ..that's the what for and why sorted out.

mudslide73

Dealer raffle prizes. Businesses that benefit from the forum voluntarily donate prizes for an annual raffle bonanza. 18watt.com did this a few years back to great effect. 

frictionfraction

Confession.. I have neither bought a calendar or donated in the past - as I am like most people just too Idle (or tight) to do it.  however I think what we have here is great and i should and would pay to keep it going particularly if that s what is needed. Maybe a donation button on the home page would prick people's consciences and bring in the cash.   

crunchman

Any kind of fee to sign up would kill the forum.  I would never have signed up to a forum where I had to pay to sign up.  You need to keep new users coming in as existing people will leave for various reasons.

Any significant fee to use the classifieds would also probably kill things long term as it would reduce traffic a lot.  With less buyers the classifieds would die, and people who find the forum through them would stop coming.

I'd start by modifying the layout to add a Donate button at the top of the page, and put sticky threads at the top of the major sections explaining the need for donations.

If the Ebay link thing is easy then do that as well.

You could do that and see how much money it bought in over 3 months.  If it brings in enough money then problem solved.  If it doesn't then go a bit further - either with some kind of charging (probably a small yearly fee) for the classifieds, or some kind of charges for business users.

crunchman

Any kind of fee to sign up would kill the forum.  I would never have signed up to a forum where I had to pay to sign up.  You need to keep new users coming in as existing people will leave for various reasons.

Any significant fee to use the classifieds would also probably kill things long term as it would reduce traffic a lot.  With less buyers the classifieds would die, and people who find the forum through them would stop coming.

I'd start by modifying the layout to add a Donate button at the top of the page, and put sticky threads at the top of the major sections explaining the need for donations.

If the Ebay link thing is easy then do that as well.

You could do that and see how much money it bought in over 3 months.  If it brings in enough money then problem solved.  If it doesn't then go a bit further - either with some kind of charging (probably a small yearly fee) for the classifieds, or some kind of charges for business users.