@kkrajk said: USD $10 per year mandatory Provider donation / membership.
Regarding this, I second what others have been saying before: I don't think it is a good idea for any community, to put features for general forum participation (that includes provider tag) behind a paywall. Now, I get that some arguments are that they are making money and other arguments in favor of this would be to reduce spam/scam providers. While a paywall may keep spam/scam providers out, it is no guarantee that this will be the case. To get a provider tag you already have to apply and are being verified and if you run a company at least it would be assumed you are serious (benefit of the doubt). And so far the situation here in regard to spam/scam is fairly well, anyway. Introducing a paywall could, however, keep cool, new providers/startups (like perhaps these 3 romanian students that joined as a host the other day iirc?) away that are either on a budget or are new to this place. While 10$/year may not sound much, being a freelancer myself, I see expenses adding up and if every forum/discord I joined introduced a provider tag fee, I'd probably be turned away, especially if I had not known said community for a while (e.g. a new place). Just my two cents
Thank you everyone for the input! Some great ideas posted here for us to chew on and discuss further.
Some feedback based on a quick discussion between Mikael and myself:
To set us up for success, whatever revenue model we pursue, it needs to be automated (or mostly automated) so that Mikael and myself won't need to spend hours facilitating collection/tracking of revenue. Simply put, if we're required to put in multiple hours of effort into it then from my perspective, I'd rather just pay out of my own pocket rather than my time. I've got a second child on the way in the coming weeks and as a wise woman once said, "ain't nobody got time for dat".
One thing to note, we aren't in favor of a pay-to-participate/join model -- either on the user-side or the provider-side. In theory, this sounds like it might be a good way to bring in steady revenue, however in practice, we feel that this will lower participation, stunt our growth, and drive people to seek LES alternatives elsewhere.
We do like the idea of providers "bidding" on being the sponsor of upcoming blog posts. How this would work is that we'd post a thread in the provider's section of the forum with the title and length of the post and perhaps a small summary/snippet, then allow providers to bid to win sponsorship of said post. We'll work on the details of this further and put out some feelers to see if providers would be on-board with this approach.
Another suggestion still on the table is a dual ads + sponsorship/patreon-style model. Regarding ads, if they do come back, I think we'll use static images and not GIFs so things don't get out of hand with "flashiness". Regarding sponsorships, we need to come up with some perks that ideally won't drive a wedge between sponsoring members/providers and regular users. Custom tags, name colors, or flair is our initial thought on that with some more thinking needed to come up with additional perks. We want to avoid sponsorship granting early access to deals as that's bound to backfire eventually with deals being shared outside the community, either publicly or privately.
More to come as @mikho and I have some further discussions on this. We'll probably be creating a provider's-only thread soon to gauge interest in some of the items above to see if they're worth pursuing.
Again, thank you all for your inputs. I'm glad we have a community full of diverse, intelligent individuals and it's been great hearing your thoughts on this. We hope that this discussion gives a glimpse of how we'll try our best to make community-wide decisions after consulting with the community itself -- this isn't the M&M show, everyone here that participates should have a voice in how we do things and how we operate as a family and community.
Will revisit this soon(tm) after Mikael and I have a more lengthy discussion on the topic and flesh out things some more.
@Mason said:
Thank you everyone for the input! Some great ideas posted here for us to chew on and discuss further.
Some feedback based on a quick discussion between Mikael and myself:
To set us up for success, whatever revenue model we pursue, it needs to be automated (or mostly automated) so that Mikael and myself won't need to spend hours facilitating collection/tracking of revenue. Simply put, if we're required to put in multiple hours of effort into it then from my perspective, I'd rather just pay out of my own pocket rather than my time. I've got a second child on the way in the coming weeks and as a wise woman once put, "ain't nobody got time for dat".
One thing to note, we aren't in favor of a pay-to-participate/join model -- either on the user-side or the provider-side. In theory, this sounds like it might be a good way to bring in steady revenue, however in practice, we feel that this will lower participation, stunt our growth, and drive people to seek LES alternatives elsewhere.
We do like the idea of providers "bidding" on being the sponsor of upcoming blog posts. How this would work is that we'd post a thread in the provider's section of the forum with the title and length of the post and perhaps a small summary/snippet, then allow providers to bid to win sponsorship of said post. We'll work on the details of this further and put out some feelers to see if providers would be on-board with this approach.
Another suggestion still on the table is a dual ads + sponsorship/patreon-style model. Regarding ads, if they do come back, I think we'll use static images and not GIFs so things don't get out of hand with "flashiness". Regarding sponsorships, we need to come up with some perks that ideally won't drive a wedge between sponsoring members/providers and regular users. Custom tags, name colors, or flair is our initial thought on that with some more thinking needed to come up with additional perks. We want to avoid sponsorship granting early access to deals as that's bound to backfire eventually with deals being shared outside the community, either publicly or privately.
More to come as @mikho and I have some further discussions on this. We'll probably be creating a provider's-only thread soon to gauge interest in some of the items above to see if they're worth pursuing.
Again, thank you all for your inputs. I'm glad we have a community full of diverse, intelligent individuals and it's been great hearing your thoughts on this. We hope that this discussion gives a glimpse of how we'll try our best to make community-wide decisions after consulting with the community itself -- this isn't the M&M show, everyone here that participates should have a voice in how we do things and how we operate as a family and community.
Will revisit this soon(tm) after Mikael and I have a more lengthy discussion on the topic and flesh out things some more.
3x Hetzner CPX11 VMs w/ Backups inc. 15/mo VMs for Forum, Blog, and Dev
I'll happily sposor one or two of those in exchange for a banner
Hey, thanks for the offer! I'll have to decline for now. We'd like our infra to avoid sponsorships for the time being and keep things independently paid for and managed so that we maintain a purely client-provider relationship with our hosting/service providers.
3x Hetzner CPX11 VMs w/ Backups inc. 15/mo VMs for Forum, Blog, and Dev
I'll happily sposor one or two of those in exchange for a banner
Hey, thanks for the offer! I'll have to decline for now. We'd like our infra to avoid sponsorships for the time being and keep things independently paid for and managed so that we maintain a purely client-provider relationship with our hosting/service providers.
Meaning i'd expect an invoice for the sponsorship with a predefined amount and you use that money however you see fit
(most likely applying it towards the servers/infra)
@Mason said:
Thank you everyone for the input! Some great ideas posted here for us to chew on and discuss further.
Some feedback based on a quick discussion between Mikael and myself:
To set us up for success, whatever revenue model we pursue, it needs to be automated (or mostly automated) so that Mikael and myself won't need to spend hours facilitating collection/tracking of revenue. Simply put, if we're required to put in multiple hours of effort into it then from my perspective, I'd rather just pay out of my own pocket rather than my time. I've got a second child on the way in the coming weeks and as a wise woman once said, "ain't nobody got time for dat".
One thing to note, we aren't in favor of a pay-to-participate/join model -- either on the user-side or the provider-side. In theory, this sounds like it might be a good way to bring in steady revenue, however in practice, we feel that this will lower participation, stunt our growth, and drive people to seek LES alternatives elsewhere.
We do like the idea of providers "bidding" on being the sponsor of upcoming blog posts. How this would work is that we'd post a thread in the provider's section of the forum with the title and length of the post and perhaps a small summary/snippet, then allow providers to bid to win sponsorship of said post. We'll work on the details of this further and put out some feelers to see if providers would be on-board with this approach.
Another suggestion still on the table is a dual ads + sponsorship/patreon-style model. Regarding ads, if they do come back, I think we'll use static images and not GIFs so things don't get out of hand with "flashiness". Regarding sponsorships, we need to come up with some perks that ideally won't drive a wedge between sponsoring members/providers and regular users. Custom tags, name colors, or flair is our initial thought on that with some more thinking needed to come up with additional perks. We want to avoid sponsorship granting early access to deals as that's bound to backfire eventually with deals being shared outside the community, either publicly or privately.
More to come as @mikho and I have some further discussions on this. We'll probably be creating a provider's-only thread soon to gauge interest in some of the items above to see if they're worth pursuing.
Again, thank you all for your inputs. I'm glad we have a community full of diverse, intelligent individuals and it's been great hearing your thoughts on this. We hope that this discussion gives a glimpse of how we'll try our best to make community-wide decisions after consulting with the community itself -- this isn't the M&M show, everyone here that participates should have a voice in how we do things and how we operate as a family and community.
Will revisit this soon(tm) after Mikael and I have a more lengthy discussion on the topic and flesh out things some more.
Much love,
M&M
Congratz and best wishes for the baby, mate! Totally see why you would not want more tasks on your plate than you already do. An automated revenue model thus would definitely be useful here. All in all I think we can be very happy to have our M&M's and, of course, this awesome community to work hand in hand towards the future. Looking forward to see how this turns out
I really don't think 1 and 2 need to be mutually exclusive, I would personally chip in via patreon and it gives you a platform for real exclusive content and deals.
Adverts also really 100% do not hurt anyone, people can argue this point all they want I will just point you to an AdBlock plugin link, it is 2021, deal with it and stop crying for attention because something blinked on a screen
@InceptionHosting said: Adverts also really 100% do not hurt anyone, people can argue this point all they want I will just point you to an AdBlock plugin link, it is 2021, deal with it and stop crying for attention because something blinked on a screen
pretty much this - unless some forum owners start trying to sneak it in anyways by looking for ways to bypass adblockers and force their blinky shite upon you ;-)
@InceptionHosting said: Adverts also really 100% do not hurt anyone, people can argue this point all they want I will just point you to an AdBlock plugin link, it is 2021, deal with it and stop crying for attention because something blinked on a screen
pretty much this - unless some forum owners start trying to sneak it in anyways by looking for ways to bypass adblockers and force their blinky shite upon you ;-)
I will disable the whole site for people who uses adblockers
@InceptionHosting said: Adverts also really 100% do not hurt anyone, people can argue this point all they want I will just point you to an AdBlock plugin link, it is 2021, deal with it and stop crying for attention because something blinked on a screen
pretty much this - unless some forum owners start trying to sneak it in anyways by looking for ways to bypass adblockers and force their blinky shite upon you ;-)
I will disable the whole site for people who uses adblockers
feel free to do that 🤷♂️😁 ... most likely make the community grow faster not.
I know Forums that bring me less traffic where you pay 25€ (or was it 50? not sure) to post a offer and also pay xx€ to bump your thread on top.
Would be a idea.
Either way, 2) is also perfectly fine with me. Sounds good.
@InceptionHosting said: Adverts also really 100% do not hurt anyone, people can argue this point all they want I will just point you to an AdBlock plugin link, it is 2021, deal with it and stop crying for attention because something blinked on a screen
pretty much this - unless some forum owners start trying to sneak it in anyways by looking for ways to bypass adblockers and force their blinky shite upon you ;-)
I will disable the whole site for people who uses adblockers
I like the idea of paying $x once/monthly/yearly for example and having access to "another area" of the forum. Had that before over on another forum I used to frequent and it seemed to work out quite well.
Also like the idea someone else mentioned on the ad spots where you could buy them out with a "blank" option.
Syuh - sftp, rsync & rclone accessible storage from 50GB to TBs.
@ialexpw said:
I like the idea of paying $x once/monthly/yearly for example and having access to "another area" of the forum. Had that before over on another forum I used to frequent and it seemed to work out quite well.
Also like the idea someone else mentioned on the ad spots where you could buy them out with a "blank" option.
My 2c (pun intended):
A downside to such a policy is it is discriminatory towards the poor.
The upside is that it's a fair and honest way to get the funding.
Having a symbolic monthly fee would probably negate the downside to a great extent.
Relja of House Novović, the First of His Name, King of the Plains, the Breaker of Chains, WirMach Wolves pack member BikeGremlin's web-hosting reviews
It seems to me that people who have engaged are pretty much ok with any option, no one is vigorously attacking any option so it makes sense to give people just that, options
@InceptionHosting said:
It seems to me that people who have engaged are pretty much ok with any option, no one is vigorously attacking any option so it makes sense to give people just that, options
I would support LES through Patreon (even without any perks) and still wouldn’t complain about ads.
Providers make money by selling.
People come here for sales and for info.
The more people that visit, the greater the chance of sales.
So sales should generate revenue for LES - not the consumers.
@msatt said:
Providers make money by selling.
People come here for sales and for info.
The more people that visit, the greater the chance of sales.
So sales should generate revenue for LES - not the consumers.
@msatt said:
Providers make money by selling.
People come here for sales and for info.
The more people that visit, the greater the chance of sales.
So sales should generate revenue for LES - not the consumers.
That is why this place never will be a ”pay2visit” community.
“Technology is best when it brings people together.” – Matt Mullenweg
"A single swap file or partition may be up to 128 MB in size. [...] [I]f you need 256 MB of swap, you can create two 128-MB swap partitions." (M. Welsh & L. Kaufman, Running Linux, 2e, 1996, p. 49)
Comments
USD $10 per year mandatory Provider donation / membership.
www.4ya.in
Regarding this, I second what others have been saying before: I don't think it is a good idea for any community, to put features for general forum participation (that includes provider tag) behind a paywall. Now, I get that some arguments are that they are making money and other arguments in favor of this would be to reduce spam/scam providers. While a paywall may keep spam/scam providers out, it is no guarantee that this will be the case. To get a provider tag you already have to apply and are being verified and if you run a company at least it would be assumed you are serious (benefit of the doubt). And so far the situation here in regard to spam/scam is fairly well, anyway. Introducing a paywall could, however, keep cool, new providers/startups (like perhaps these 3 romanian students that joined as a host the other day iirc?) away that are either on a budget or are new to this place. While 10$/year may not sound much, being a freelancer myself, I see expenses adding up and if every forum/discord I joined introduced a provider tag fee, I'd probably be turned away, especially if I had not known said community for a while (e.g. a new place). Just my two cents
Ympker's VPN LTD Comparison, Uptime.is, Ympker's GitHub.
I'll happily sposor one or two of those in exchange for a banner
★ MyRoot.PW ★ Dedicated Servers ★ Web-Hosting ★ LIR-Services ★
★ MrVM ★ Virtual Servers ★
★ Blesta.Store ★ Blesta licenses and Add-ons at amazing Prices ★
Thank you everyone for the input! Some great ideas posted here for us to chew on and discuss further.
Some feedback based on a quick discussion between Mikael and myself:
Again, thank you all for your inputs. I'm glad we have a community full of diverse, intelligent individuals and it's been great hearing your thoughts on this. We hope that this discussion gives a glimpse of how we'll try our best to make community-wide decisions after consulting with the community itself -- this isn't the M&M show, everyone here that participates should have a voice in how we do things and how we operate as a family and community.
Will revisit this soon(tm) after Mikael and I have a more lengthy discussion on the topic and flesh out things some more.
Much love,
M&M
Head Janitor @ LES • About • Rules • Support
Congrats for the baby !!!
Dentistry is my passion
Hey, thanks for the offer! I'll have to decline for now. We'd like our infra to avoid sponsorships for the time being and keep things independently paid for and managed so that we maintain a purely client-provider relationship with our hosting/service providers.
Head Janitor @ LES • About • Rules • Support
Meaning i'd expect an invoice for the sponsorship with a predefined amount and you use that money however you see fit
(most likely applying it towards the servers/infra)
★ MyRoot.PW ★ Dedicated Servers ★ Web-Hosting ★ LIR-Services ★
★ MrVM ★ Virtual Servers ★
★ Blesta.Store ★ Blesta licenses and Add-ons at amazing Prices ★
Congratz and best wishes for the baby, mate! Totally see why you would not want more tasks on your plate than you already do. An automated revenue model thus would definitely be useful here. All in all I think we can be very happy to have our M&M's and, of course, this awesome community to work hand in hand towards the future. Looking forward to see how this turns out
Ympker's VPN LTD Comparison, Uptime.is, Ympker's GitHub.
I really don't think 1 and 2 need to be mutually exclusive, I would personally chip in via patreon and it gives you a platform for real exclusive content and deals.
Adverts also really 100% do not hurt anyone, people can argue this point all they want I will just point you to an AdBlock plugin link, it is 2021, deal with it and stop crying for attention because something blinked on a screen
https://inceptionhosting.com
Please do not use the PM system here for Inception Hosting support issues.
pretty much this - unless some forum owners start trying to sneak it in anyways by looking for ways to bypass adblockers and force their blinky shite upon you ;-)
I will disable the whole site for people who uses adblockers
“Technology is best when it brings people together.” – Matt Mullenweg
feel free to do that 🤷♂️😁 ... most likely make the community grow faster not.
I know Forums that bring me less traffic where you pay 25€ (or was it 50? not sure) to post a offer and also pay xx€ to bump your thread on top.
Would be a idea.
Either way, 2) is also perfectly fine with me. Sounds good.
Free NAT KVM | Free NAT LXC
You can charge me for keeping my troll tag.
7 bucks a year, I am willing to accept.
♻ Amitz day is October 21.
♻ Join Nigh sect by adopting my avatar. Let us spread the joys of the end.
I like the idea of paying $x once/monthly/yearly for example and having access to "another area" of the forum. Had that before over on another forum I used to frequent and it seemed to work out quite well.
Also like the idea someone else mentioned on the ad spots where you could buy them out with a "blank" option.
Syuh - sftp, rsync & rclone accessible storage from 50GB to TBs.
My 2c (pun intended):
A downside to such a policy is it is discriminatory towards the poor.
The upside is that it's a fair and honest way to get the funding.
Having a symbolic monthly fee would probably negate the downside to a great extent.
Relja of House Novović, the First of His Name, King of the Plains, the Breaker of Chains, WirMach Wolves pack member
BikeGremlin's web-hosting reviews
Ads seem like the easier route...cause you have a captive targeted audience and advertisers already essentially.
If possible can we make them static though. I personally find it tough reading text with moving stuff in peripheral vision. More ads seems preferable.
Patron...maybe to sponsor specific initiatives / blog posts? Wouldn't rely on it full time.
Perhaps allowing providers stick a jpeg banner into signature for a fee? Would be kinda ugly but think it could work
Static ad is fine. I can tolerate them.
If it's animated at any degree, I simply remove it with ad block.
♻ Amitz day is October 21.
♻ Join Nigh sect by adopting my avatar. Let us spread the joys of the end.
Would you rather see those flashy RackNerd and HostSailor ads, or a subtle animation like this?
Can I have a push-up specialist tag for $7/decade?
ServerFactory aff best VPS; HostBrr aff best storage.
Neither if I'm being honest
Head Janitor @ LES • About • Rules • Support
It seems to me that people who have engaged are pretty much ok with any option, no one is vigorously attacking any option so it makes sense to give people just that, options
https://inceptionhosting.com
Please do not use the PM system here for Inception Hosting support issues.
I would support LES through Patreon (even without any perks) and still wouldn’t complain about ads.
Providers make money by selling.
People come here for sales and for info.
The more people that visit, the greater the chance of sales.
So sales should generate revenue for LES - not the consumers.
I come here for the meme.
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Storage VPS | LiteSpeed Powered Web Hosting + SSH access | Switcher Special |
That is why this place never will be a ”pay2visit” community.
“Technology is best when it brings people together.” – Matt Mullenweg
Just realize the poll and voting results were wiped when I unannounced the thread.... Way to go, Vanilla.
I think we have a good amount to discuss and a general concensus in this anyways
Head Janitor @ LES • About • Rules • Support
I'd chip in with Patreon no questions asked.
I'm the 85%. Also Elon likes memes hence he's an idiot.
(Sorry, I'm late to respond.)
Just to say:
"A single swap file or partition may be up to 128 MB in size. [...] [I]f you need 256 MB of swap, you can create two 128-MB swap partitions." (M. Welsh & L. Kaufman, Running Linux, 2e, 1996, p. 49)
Sorry didn't read the whole messages.
I suggest a new user tag for donor. Some people like recognition.
Yeah, I registered here only to get OG tag, otherwise I'll be lurker.
UpCloud free $25 through this aff link - Akamai, DigitalOcean and Vultr alternative, multiple location, IPv6.