Down Time Update

New job title to add to your resumé: Rosemary Orchard Hamster Wrangler

More seriously, though, I’d just like to say thank you to those responsible for this forum for the way that it is run and for the amazing amount of time that it is actually up and available at no cost to us and as a ‘hobby’ for the mods. The fact that we miss the forum when it is down just goes to show how popular it is which is a product of how good a job the mods do in maintaining and running it and also to supportive of a community it is.

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And in fairness, when I first noticed it, it would have been very early (6-ish?) in the morning in CA.

@ismh, @RosemaryOrchard, and I are going to get together to find a long-term solution. We set this forum up to be a place free of the usual madness of the Internet and it’s succeeded so well that it’s occasionally breaking.

I can tell you that the annual cost of keeping this afloat (between hosting and the mail service) is about $1,000. Stephen and I each pay half of that. We are willing to throw more money at this to make it more stable. We just want to do that in a way that makes sense and we need to figure that out. We’re also likely going to look at a way to monetize it a bit to offset the costs. Probably non-creepy banner ads, but we have to figure that out as well.

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I assume managed hosting (SaaS) is hard to do due to amount of page views, then? Because this would be far cheaper than the amount of hours you’re currently spending on maintenance.

I work with development (and recently building a hybrid cloud platform) in northern Europe, and we ALWAYS buy SaaS if we can.

Edit: If you’re interested, I actually recently co-wrote the cloud strategy for a major government entity, so I have quite a bit of knowledge about the pros and cons. PM me if you guys want to discuss.

I would prefer creepy ads. Example:

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What if you just started with a tip jar and see if we can raise $1500/year through that. I think there are many of us who appreciate how different this online community is from (many) others we’ve been a part of.

Also - I can’t believe MacStadium won’t just give you a free VPS for this. Seems like a good fit for them and a reputation boost :wink:

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That’s a great idea. I’m certainly keen to contribute!

I would be more than happy to pay a subscription for this forum – especially if that would stave off any kinds of ads. Some pleasant corner of the internet where no one is trying to turn our eyeballs into dollars.

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I was actually thinking that offering a “supporter” donation option for $10 or $20 per year would probably get enough people chipping in to pay for all the server fees.

if they could find some way to give a Discourse badge or award or achievement or whatever those things are called for “supporter”, that would be a cool way of acknowledging people that chipped in too.

I’m really picky about subscriptions, but I’d totally kick in $10-$20 per year to help out the forum. :slight_smile:

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It would certainly be interesting to know how much would be raised through a tip jar as many of us would contribute.
There’s certainly a large number of people of visit the forum many times every week, and plenty of people at least as active as me.

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I’m in for a tip jar, no way should you guys have to pay $500 each a year when so many would be willing to cover that for you.

Would rather this approach than adverts if possible, that I’d just end up blocking and you wouldn’t see any revenue.

As to downtime and stability, this is a true community site, so is part of the charm?

All I’ve got is a pile of thanks to each of you for providing this unique place for us to be kind and gentle to each other :heart::kissing_heart::heart_eyes::blush::smiling_face_with_three_hearts::heart_eyes_cat::cupid::gift_heart:

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You don’t want to run this on MacOS.

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Likewise Automators, though it doesn’t seem to suffer from the same “success” :slight_smile: problem just yet.

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Is this an example of an oxymoron?

I support using a tip jar or a call for donations at certain intervals (like Wikipedia). I would think there are enough people here who would contribute and offset some, if not all the costs.

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Maybe one of those donation banners that pops up every 3/6 months.

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In the past I’ve offered to subscribe to the forum, but now I’d rather send that to MacSparky Labs. Sorry, Stephen. :smiling_imp:

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If we do this, it’d be an image, some text and a link, like what we do on our respective blogs. No weird JavaScript or other “creepy” stuff.

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This is the 2nd or 3rd time on this forum where my attempt at humor has failed because I didn’t add a happy smile face emoji at the end to designate the statement as such. (All the other times my humor has failed was because of the lack of funniness.) :grinning:

I don’t see an example on your blog at present but I did see this one on David’s blog. This is not what I think of as a banner ad but, by definition, it seems to be. It is non-obtrusive and is certainly not creepy. This type of ad would not detract from this forum but I’d still prefer it to be user-funded in some manner.

Perhaps a deoxymoron then.

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Someone once told me I’m part oxymoron. I’m not sure which part, though.

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