Sociopath Community

You could have just said you didn't like the idea of this community ever making enough money to financially support itself.

I won't expect you to donate, and guess what.. you don't have to. It's still free to you.. it's us who pays.

^

and you have distributed the cost to senior members only. you say you need 12, so your company would pay nothing?

Right. My idea is that a small group of long time users who CARE about the website can help us to pay the costs.

In exchange, we will offer them the opportunity to have a say in development of this community.

You could almost say that they are going to become "stock holders" of the forum, and as such, have a stay in development direction.

This reduces costs for us, creates an organize democratic system for introducing ideas, and voting on them therefor giving them the opportunity to choose the direction this community grows in.

12 members = cost. We ask for 15 MAX. This means that we have room for improved server costs when we add more features. I'm therefor limiting the amount of revenue the system makes us to the aprox. amount we pay ourselves.

And you are paying Emily to try an manipulate us but it's backfiring badly 

I'd like if you describe more how I'm doing that.

It's actually a bit higher than that - We went with a fairly expensive server in lieu of HBO. 

That said, we do almost exhaust the server's RAM (anyone who recalls the crashes right after search initially went live, that was due to out of memory), although its CPU hasn't been taxed. So we upgraded the RAM to have a nice buffer.

There are a lot of free services or cheap services out there, that provide quite a bit and rely on sheer quantity of subscription or donations from an established (and preferably large) userbase. Or advertisements. At $4.17 per month, it'd take approximately 17 subscribers to reduce the monthly server bill to that of a shared hosting plan.

If you're interested in our hosting provider, it's bigwetfish, and here is one of their lists of server packages. We have the VPS3 which is 49.98 in british pounds. The most recent google conversion rate for the british pound to USD places the value at $80.50. It fluctuates a bit. Luna was being modest.

Luna liked the membership concept mainly to mitigate the monthly cost, as opposed to it being a source of profit.

On top of that, we made this for no pay. ;) If you factored in what we'd have been paid, then the price tag would certainly go up, at least moderately. Though it was and still is a fun project. It's the first time we've made a forum, much less a chat, from scratch. It's given fairly good insights on what it takes.

I hope everyone's enjoying the place! Also, this forum will be around for a while. A long while. A very long while. The server can handle it, as you might imagine given the $600+ (Luna's modest estimate) a year bill. ;) You can consider the remaining ($360 a year) as being out of my own pocket for the projects we do on the server.

I'm comfortable with the actual bill. I live well. I've put their support staff through quite a bit, but bigwetfish has proved to be a very good server provider overall.

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So why take the forum on in the first place then? Fucking lol. Did you not forecast the costs? You and luna always had one eye on our money. Rope enough of the dumb bastards in first. Try and make them care about the 'community.' They will cough up eventually.

Just admit it. Say, we took on this forum in the hope of charging a fee after x amount of time to buy shit loads of weed. It's not about the higher purpose, it's about the hire purse.

Hi Jay!

The idea was limit donations to that of only what we need for server costs.

Your idea is certainly for profit I don't think the members of the forum would be happy with us using them to make monies lol