(no subject)
Mostly for my own reference, this is what I ended up posting to the forum that's being run rather oddly.
First I'd like to say that this is a great forum. Most of that is down to the users, but a good chunk of the credit goes to the admins.
That said, I'm a little confused about where this forum falls on the commercial/hobby spectrum.
First, a little background. I'm on a lot of forums that fall squarely on the hobby side. They're dedicated to a variety of things: gadgets, doll collectors, Mini Cooper and Vespa owners, and TV/movie/book fandoms. Most of them fit the general profile of this forum. That is, a membership numbering in the thousands, and a very active core group of roughly one hundred or less.
All of those forums are not-for-profit, generally just to shelter the owner and admins from the owners of the real and intellectual property we're all yakking about. They all run on unlimited diskspace/bandwidth $10/month godaddy and dreamhost hosting plans. I won't argue that they aren't the spiffiest plans ever: there's the rare incident of unscheduled downtime, and hiccups where the site responds a little slowly are pretty frequent. But they have the advantage that, even adding in the cost of registering a domain and purchasing vBulletin, it's something 100 people can pay for with pocket change. Generally once a year there's a call for donations to cover the next year's hosting and domain registration. On rare occasions there's a call for donations to update vBulletin. (Since the cheapest plan is good for that version, and a version will generally last for over a year. Longer if the owner pushes it to the product end of life.)
The big hobby sites (XDA, DenOfAngels.com and archiveofourown.org are a few I use) have to do things differently. They have hundreds of thousands of members. The membership is far too segmented to have a "core". That's good in some ways -- those forums are fantastic resources for their members, and the pocket change of 10,000+ people adds up to a bigger number. The downside is that the forums lose their personality and sense of community. They're still not-for-profit, sometimes officially, sometimes not, just because their owners are in even more danger of attracting negative interest from the owner of the real or intellectual property the site is focused on. But they have to ask for donations year round, they sell things to make more money, and they host ads, so that they can keep the dedicated servers running.
This site -- doesn't fall squarely in either camp. It's far too small to be one of the monster forums that needs dedicated servers. But because it has dedicated servers, there's a constant need for donations.
Or is there really?
A couple days ago I got curious and started googling around. This site is on a dedicated server, but that server is "dedicated" to a total of 50 domains. (More or less -- a number of domains had just been transferred off a day or two earlier, and I wasn't willing to pay $20+ for the detailed list of domains.) At least one of those domains is another hobby forum. That I've got absolutely no argument with. Presumably they're also helping to fund the server, and if that forum happens to be too small to contribute much it's fine to have another hobby forum piggy backing on this forum's resources.
But at least four of the domains are clearly commercial. dreamquestfactory.com is Derwin's own website creation and hosting site. (NOTE: according to my antivirus that site is infected! It tends to be overzealous, but I'd avoid visiting it until Derwin has a chance to make sure it's clean.) The other three are nabuildingsolutions.com, scooterpod.net and peppos.com. Personally, I'm not comfortable helping to fund the servers if they're being used for commercial sites. Everyone else's mileage may vary, but my thought is that the commercial sites should be bearing the brunt of the financial burden of running the server. If they truly don't have the traffic compared to the forums to justify that, then maybe the non-commercial sites (this one and flytheroad.com) should be moved back to inexpensive unlimited bandwidth/diskspace shared hosting (since hobby sites can afford a little downtime), and the commercial sites could be moved to a less expensive virtual or dedicated server plan that better fits their traffic (since customers generally demand 99.99% uptime, whether they need it or not.)
Okay. Sorry for the novel, and sorry if this is a little disjointed. (I'm a programmer Jim, not a writer!)
First I'd like to say that this is a great forum. Most of that is down to the users, but a good chunk of the credit goes to the admins.
That said, I'm a little confused about where this forum falls on the commercial/hobby spectrum.
First, a little background. I'm on a lot of forums that fall squarely on the hobby side. They're dedicated to a variety of things: gadgets, doll collectors, Mini Cooper and Vespa owners, and TV/movie/book fandoms. Most of them fit the general profile of this forum. That is, a membership numbering in the thousands, and a very active core group of roughly one hundred or less.
All of those forums are not-for-profit, generally just to shelter the owner and admins from the owners of the real and intellectual property we're all yakking about. They all run on unlimited diskspace/bandwidth $10/month godaddy and dreamhost hosting plans. I won't argue that they aren't the spiffiest plans ever: there's the rare incident of unscheduled downtime, and hiccups where the site responds a little slowly are pretty frequent. But they have the advantage that, even adding in the cost of registering a domain and purchasing vBulletin, it's something 100 people can pay for with pocket change. Generally once a year there's a call for donations to cover the next year's hosting and domain registration. On rare occasions there's a call for donations to update vBulletin. (Since the cheapest plan is good for that version, and a version will generally last for over a year. Longer if the owner pushes it to the product end of life.)
The big hobby sites (XDA, DenOfAngels.com and archiveofourown.org are a few I use) have to do things differently. They have hundreds of thousands of members. The membership is far too segmented to have a "core". That's good in some ways -- those forums are fantastic resources for their members, and the pocket change of 10,000+ people adds up to a bigger number. The downside is that the forums lose their personality and sense of community. They're still not-for-profit, sometimes officially, sometimes not, just because their owners are in even more danger of attracting negative interest from the owner of the real or intellectual property the site is focused on. But they have to ask for donations year round, they sell things to make more money, and they host ads, so that they can keep the dedicated servers running.
This site -- doesn't fall squarely in either camp. It's far too small to be one of the monster forums that needs dedicated servers. But because it has dedicated servers, there's a constant need for donations.
Or is there really?
A couple days ago I got curious and started googling around. This site is on a dedicated server, but that server is "dedicated" to a total of 50 domains. (More or less -- a number of domains had just been transferred off a day or two earlier, and I wasn't willing to pay $20+ for the detailed list of domains.) At least one of those domains is another hobby forum. That I've got absolutely no argument with. Presumably they're also helping to fund the server, and if that forum happens to be too small to contribute much it's fine to have another hobby forum piggy backing on this forum's resources.
But at least four of the domains are clearly commercial. dreamquestfactory.com is Derwin's own website creation and hosting site. (NOTE: according to my antivirus that site is infected! It tends to be overzealous, but I'd avoid visiting it until Derwin has a chance to make sure it's clean.) The other three are nabuildingsolutions.com, scooterpod.net and peppos.com. Personally, I'm not comfortable helping to fund the servers if they're being used for commercial sites. Everyone else's mileage may vary, but my thought is that the commercial sites should be bearing the brunt of the financial burden of running the server. If they truly don't have the traffic compared to the forums to justify that, then maybe the non-commercial sites (this one and flytheroad.com) should be moved back to inexpensive unlimited bandwidth/diskspace shared hosting (since hobby sites can afford a little downtime), and the commercial sites could be moved to a less expensive virtual or dedicated server plan that better fits their traffic (since customers generally demand 99.99% uptime, whether they need it or not.)
Okay. Sorry for the novel, and sorry if this is a little disjointed. (I'm a programmer Jim, not a writer!)