I voted for "donation more", but I am more than willing to do a membership.
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I voted for "donation more", but I am more than willing to do a membership.
I'd be up for a $10-$20 membership!
Where is the donation button
Running forums takes time and money. I am not going to get into specifics since you can probably google what most of this all costs but. Software license, server space, more server space as the site grows and renewing the domain name every year. Right now the site is made up Alie, Limey, My self and the guy who runs our server space for us, his name is Jon.
We pay Jon, er rather Alie has out of her pocket for the work he does keeping the lights on. The vBulletin license was purchased and the site was launched in beta on August 1st of 2010. September first it was when it actually was open to registration after we invited about 10 tattooer friends on here to help seed the site. The first year of hosting and server maintenance was done in trade for work Alie did for our system admin guy Jon. After that we started paying him since the site grew really fast and needed to be moved to a bigger more robust server. If you have been here long enough you will remember a week where we had downtime that lasted two days at one point. This was when we where moving the site and Jon was setting up a new server after the drives on one died. Long story short this site has no ads and was built that way from the beginning. We do not ask for donations because that opens a can of worms.
The site costs us money and come september our hosting fees are going up. I need to lock down gallery space as well this is why you have a cap on pm storage. There are a great deal of changes that will happen with the site in the fall, including a supporting member program. The big reason for this is well why should we pay for you to all be here? If you want to drop 10 or 20$ a year because the site is cool and you want more pm space because you buy and sell a ton of machines on here or other stuff and you have trouble when people complain your inbox is full then awesome. If you promote a product on here or have done more than one sale or trade on here and dont think tossing a few bucks back to help keep the lights on for another year is worth it to you I would be happy to show you how to build your own forum and let you make one you can run for your self until you have to start worrying about it getting attacked or ddos'ed or paying bills or spending an hour every other day dealing with all the hate mail and spam registrations.
For builders I will have something different for you guys. I am a firm believer that its better to see a legitimate return on something when you help out a site.
FYI, we could have opened up the site from day one with google or ad meld or adbright ads on here. Would have probably made it so we would make a small amount of money on CPI or CPC but none of the good builders or distributors buy that kind of advertising traffic. This is why you have not seen ads for world wide, came or some one trying to sell you russian brides on here.
Membership is a great idea.
A lot of areas could be members only.
Yeah good idea, nothing worth having is free - id be up for a membership fee
Yeah new members could do like a 10 day free trial to see if they like it. That way we don't scare any new comers off right away. Once they try it out, they'll gladly pay the membership. If not, no losses on either side. It'll free up a lot of server space by not having inactive members on file.
lost in this strange galaxy.....
@ckealohajr_tattoo
I'm up for it. If you only think the money you save just by buying one used machine will pay for the membership. Not to mention how helpful people are when some one asked for information.
Im only a member a couple of months and love the forum id have no problem donating or paying a Membership .