What happened: 2016 edition.

[JohnYayas]

Might be helpful to come up with a quote for they new PL system and what it will cost per month to keep it running. Let us know. Then maybe we can help figure out a way to spread it across more people or maybe certain individuals or companies might decide to help sponsor certain portions. Maybe I could pony up the money for your forum software in exchange for a small logo in the corner. Just a thought.

[Bradfo69]

^I should probably sponsor the Buy/Sell thread.
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I don't know a damn thing about what you're talking about. The only thing I know about running something like this is, it costs money. I trust that you know what you're talking about and, my personal feeling is... if a chunk of money is necessary to go ahead and make a transition to something that will make your life easier and PL run better, don't hesitate to throw it out there and say, "Guy's, here's the deal. I need X number of dollars to do a major upgrade PL." I can think of a whole lot of people, even regular subscribers, who would willingly toss $50 or $100 as a one shot deal to keep the lights on and the wheels turning. Even though many cry poor, having been the point person for donation collection for a couple causes on here, I've found many members to be quite philanthropic with hearts of gold.

[kecked]

I was just going to ask how much you need. I might cough up a substantial amount to help and then ask for a match. Define what you need plus a comfortable extra to keep it going. Then figure out what you need to ke it going each year. Goal one we get you moved with hardware and one years operations expenses. Goal two sustainable operations costs.

For goal one we raise it as a capital campaign. Goal two like wiki. You ask for donations. You'll find only a few will step up but we few will make it happen. I can hold a load others might not. That's ok in my book. You have a gem here.

Now the problem. For this to happen legally you must form a non profit organization to accept the funds. Might even want to run an indiegogo or Kickstarter fir this one and offer up some holograms or such. NO LASERS! To much risk. Maybe we can get some discountickets to laserium or such. Plenty of possibilities to make it happen.

I'm a cash cow not a volunteer to run the campaign.

[turbohead]

Count me in to donate a lump sum to transition this site to a stable environment. Let us know how much you need.

[kecked]

Let's all not make any pledges or anything until the admin comes up with a set number. I for example might pledge 500 and you say you'll match it when we really need to start at 1000 and match from there. Best to wait on this until the goal is clear, the legal obstacle is removed, and a plan is in place for sustainability.

[Aidan]

Interesting thought, if you live somewhere with decent internet considering hosting from home?
I do the very same with several sites without issue, the media may be more of an issue but I believe you get faster speeds in the us, however it's a very dirty solution.

A server to run the whole of PL (tin wise) should be less than $1000, double that for replicated ha enviroment, not insurmountable with a few decent donations.

Example I use HP DL380 G6's, dual quad / 18gb ram / 1tb across 8 disks (146 10k sas) r5 which are about $650-$750, get up to $1k adding a bit more ram and maybe some larger drives.

That's pricing from the UK, I bet you can knock off another 30% being in the us.

Hosting wise maybe somebody has some contacts in the US?

I could host 2 of the above spec servers for $130 in the uk, it's a lot cheaper in the US though so I would expect maybe 30-50% less over there? 1u DL360s may be cheaper opex wise but need to ensure you get one with 8+ drive bays.

[Banthai]

Hi Robert ... i hope all is well
I don't visit PL much nowadays but still enjoy the occasional visit
As you know i have always been a Looooooooonnnnnnggggg term subscriber in funding the forum i think since Donations were first requested ... and that's a lot of years
Sometimes i have often thought about cancelling the recurring monthly Paypal payment because of the little activity that i have now on the forum ... but suddenly that is overwritten by a voice in my head saying that without the funding the forum could finish and a lot of history could be lost so i have always backed down on cancellation ...

I'm having trouble though getting my head around the true cost of running this forum ... i certainly believe that this form could be run relatively cheaper than it was in 2006 ... i personally run a few web sites and have a History website that has 100Gb of storage and is hosted for £15 ($22) per month

As far as i can estimate we currently have 27 subscribers at $10 per month ... thats $270 per month or $3240 per year

I also believe that Photonlexicon is too big for the amount of people that are actually using it .... we currently have 3550 members but after going through the member lists it soon becomes apparent that the majority sign up and never visit again, i saw that a lot of members signed up in 2010 ... but their last visit was 2010

I think to get a better idea of the amount of active members would be to delete members that have not visited or logged in for 2+ years
i think you would be surprised on how small the forum actually is...

Im sure more people would donate if you had an additional option of a donation for a one off payment ... and if it was say for $5 or $10 you would be surprised on how many will donate ... i am a member on a website that has about 1500 members and i think about 1000 donate $5 per year .... so that $5K revenue

I also think that in conjunction with the above ... if you could be more transparent with the costs of the forum it would certainly encourage more funding if and when needed.
I think that not knowing where the money is being spent prevents many from donating ... i know you are not driving around in a new BMW so dont take it that way ...
Crowd Funding on the net has become the norm now ... so it should be no big thing to show a "business plan" with costs and donation requirement to achieve the plan

Anyway that's my bit ... i will step of my soap box and crawl back into the photons

all the best

Karl

[Aidan]

Aye, it's a lot cheaper these days for everything, bandwidth, storage, compute and colo etc.

Keeping members doesn't really cost anything extra, a few extra rows in the db and an avatar or 2 has a minamal effect.
I often end up going away for some time due to various constraints so would be very sad to come back and find my account gone!

[flecom]

there is no reason this forum should require 5 dedicated servers... maybe 5 VMs on one box, two boxes if you want to do a converged cluster or something... but definitely not 5

I work in a colo, if you want to reach out to me maybe we can work something out

also give up on vB, it's junk at this point, pretty much every major vB forum I am a member of has moved over to XenForo

https://xenforo.com/

much better software, better features, less load on servers as a bonus too

[Banthai]

Oh I agree ... keeping the members doesn't change anything Aidan
But just saying that the forum isn't as busy as it used to be ( or doesn't seem that way from this end ) this post has had 58 members views so far .. most are the regulars and 12 are subscribers ...
I think that the forum could be compacted or archived if its a cost issue ... for example does the buy and sell forum need posts that are older than 2 years ?
there are ways of cheaply hosting the FTP site or at least the data within it ... something along the lines of drop box or cloud storage etc...

all the best

Karl