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Underscoring Tor’s remarks. Setting up and maintaining a web sit as useful as this one is a very demanding task. And getting a site up, running and debugged is very challenging. Please support Ewan’s team as they provide this valuable asset to our community.There is a PayPal link on the site.Thank you,Roger
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Good question, Dan. I expect $1,000 from each of us ought to make Ewan happy.
Seriously, though, I asked him earlier what this is costing. Perhaps when he shares that number with us we’ll have an idea of what’s fair. I guess it’d also help to know how many of us site & email users there are. Then we can simply divide and conquer.
My 2-cents worth, anyway.
Tor
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Silverheels, P-424 #17
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All,
This is a longer one, so get your coffee!
Firstly, I’d like to thank the folks who have contributed to fund the site through PayPal. Shout outs to:
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Richard Dugger
Skip MacElhannon
Roger Bigger**Roger was our first donor and helped us get the donation button to the point where it worked past $5.00 🙂
Secondly, I’d like to acknowledge the willingness that you all have as expressed in contributing. A community is only a community when its members participate actively, and approximately 45 of our 170 or so registered users have visited the site and logged in to the forums since the site launched.
Thirdly, I’d like to say that I feel I am standing on the shoulders of giants. Many of you have participated in this community from the early days, when it was literally a mailed newsletter – and I want to acknowledge the enormous debt that new owners like myself owe to those of you who have lived on, and loved, the Pearson 424 from the start.
To business: Yes, the site redesign and continuous support does definitely cost money. We’ve just had to upgrade our service because we’re generating so many emails, so our hosting cost is about $20 a month for the WordPress environment we’re running – I’ve paid a year up front. Additionally, we’ve a few customizations we have to support, which means we pay for bug fixes and code changes on a monthly basis – right now, this is running around $100 per month until the site is stabilized and we have our awesome new Image Gallery system in place. I also paid for the components we’re using, most notably the plugin we have that sends out all these emails. In total, I think we’re at about $500-$750 thus far, and probably a few more hundred more this year.
So what is fair to you? What value do you get from the community? What else do you want us to get done? What other features should we implement? How would you like to contribute? I suggest you consider these questions as you consider what fits your budget. Donations thus far have varied between $20 and $105, for scale.
I for one, feel honored and privileged to be supporting the community in this way. I appreciate Pat Noordsij and Bob Fine for giving me the OK to move forward with this. The happiest email I received after we went live was from Pat – it read, simply, ‘Congratulations!’
With humility and gratitude.
Ewan
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Admin | Pearson424.org
info@pearson424.org -
One more point on subscribed users answering Tor’s question – we have about 170 or so. I am implementing a reCAPTCHA on the registration page to prove you’re human, so you’ll see that show up if you’re registering for the first time.
I know it is annoying, but I’m deleting about 50 bot users a day, and its polluting our database. Rather stop them before they get aboard and drink our rum.
Ewan
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Admin | Pearson424.org
info@pearson424.org -
Thanks, Ewan. That gives us an idea of what this is costing, i.e., about $1,200 this first year, give or take. That only amounts to $26.66 from each of us 45 logged-in members, but I suppose there may be one or two who can’t afford 25-bucks, having spent their last nickel on a new chart plotter. So, you 125 lurkers who read and maybe even sometimes write emails without going to the website (as I usually do), you know we benefit from this stuff, too, a lot more than $25-worth if we’re honest about it. So, fellow lurkers, let us too rise up and PayPal in our $25, just like the real 424-ers, and we’ll have this website & the soon-to-be-perfected emails funded for a good long while. C’mon guys & gals, pony up. This is a good thing we have. Do your part.
And while I’d hate to think any 424 owner would be so… frugal as to pass on this opportunity to share the cost of our website and information-sharing forum, well, I suppose it could happen. So to my fellow high-rollers & millionaires I would add that donating more than $25, as in $50 or even $100 if you can manage it, will guarantee that Ewan doesn’t get stuck for the cash costs when he’s already doing all the work for free.
Thank you all for being great people and keeping this going.
Tor
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Silverheels, P-424 #17
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