Me no likey

lynall said:

Any idea of rough figures/costs?

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If you all send me £50 i will look into it for you
Thanks

lynall said:

Any idea of rough figures/costs?

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Well, I know I could do it for free, but that's never really an option. The cost would largely depend on the amount of traffic and therefore the bandwidth.

It is definitely less than £100/month for a site of this size. I'd wager most likely quite a bit under half that.

I used to do this for a living (running my own business) so happy to do the figures and what not if that's wanted - I have no idea who owns/runs this place though

Many years ago we had voluntary donations to fund the site. Occasional request for donations if funds were getting low. There was never any pressure on peeps to donate. It was said they moved to adds funding the site to make it easier. There was something to do with tax that made the advert funding option easier than donations.

The adds are a bit annoying but I've seen worse on other sites. And not just forums. Its more of a problem if yer viewing the site on a phone. Also yer seem to get less adds after yer logged in.

Dunno, even now replying I've got one that pops up from the bottom; another that pops down from the top and of course all the adverts at the bottom of the page.

Tax shouldn't be an issue a along as there's no business activities going on. Even then could be charitable.

Hippo said:

Many years ago we had voluntary donations to fund the site. Occasional request for donations if funds were getting low. There was never any pressure on peeps to donate. It was said they moved to adds funding the site to make it easier. There was something to do with tax that made the advert funding option easier than donations.

The adds are a bit annoying but I've seen worse on other sites. And not just forums. Its more of a problem if yer viewing the site on a phone. Also yer seem to get less adds after yer logged in.

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i did ask sometime back about donation, and the reply I got was about it being a no go due to tax issues.
I would happily give as I think it is a great site full of great people.

domino said:

Well, I know I could do it for free, but that's never really an option. The cost would largely depend on the amount of traffic and therefore the bandwidth.

It is definitely less than £100/month for a site of this size. I'd wager most likely quite a bit under half that.

I used to do this for a living (running my own business) so happy to do the figures and what not if that's wanted - I have no idea who owns/runs this place though

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I wish it was even close to £100 a month!! There is possibly more to hosting this website than you may realise. It is large, the database containing the posts alone is huge, many many images, and the amount of people on site at one time including hundreds of guests requires some processing heft so it doesn't all just slow down and die(which sometimes it definitely does). Remote backups and bandwidth consumption also not cheap.
I do think an option to subscribe to remove ads is a good idea and will look into setting this up.

accyroy said:

I wish it was even close to £100 a month!! There is possibly more to hosting this website than you may realise. It is large, the database containing the posts alone is huge, many many images, and the amount of people on site at one time including hundreds of guests requires some processing heft so it doesn't all just slow down and die(which sometimes it definitely does). Remote backups and bandwidth consumption also not cheap.
I do think an option to subscribe to remove ads is a good idea and will look into setting this up.

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Understood. I'd be happy to help/contribute from a technical perspective if you want to perhaps reduce costs so an alternative model can adopted.

accyroy said:

I wish it was even close to £100 a month!! There is possibly more to hosting this website than you may realise. It is large, the database containing the posts alone is huge, many many images, and the amount of people on site at one time including hundreds of guests requires some processing heft so it doesn't all just slow down and die(which sometimes it definitely does). Remote backups and bandwidth consumption also not cheap.
I do think an option to subscribe to remove ads is a good idea and will look into setting this up.

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I've had to completely change the way we do things here because of the cost of servers and our business being trashed by the borders being closed.

We were using a local provider who was basically taking the piss. We could have swapped to someone like Amazon (although it would have been hosted in Aus), but even then it is still a lot of cash.

Ultimately, I've had to buy a couple of machines and host the site at home. There's big risks in down time and I have to be meticulous with backups and the like which adds to grief, but ultimately its the only way we can keep things going till hopefully the borders open up again. I'm not suggesting this is what LZ should be doing, as I say it saves cash but creates lots of grief and uncertainty, but I under stand how much hosting costs.

I contribute what I can to members in help and free parts stuff like that. Closest I can get to donation. Problem with donations seemed to be the ones doing the work were paying for the privilege.
Subscription has a better ring to it, but processing all the subscription/payment/confidential information sounds like full time job in itself?

RangeRoller dt said:

I contribute what I can to members in help and free parts stuff like that. Closest I can get to donation. Problem with donations seemed to be the ones doing the work were paying for the privilege.
Subscription has a better ring to it, but processing all the subscription/payment/confidential information sounds like full time job in itself?

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If you collect credit card info then yes, technically it is a huge responsibility and takes lots of effort and often additional costs.

We handle credit card payments but never see the card numbers so we do not need that level of security. For some things we do it by redirecting off our site to our card services provider's site where the card details are entered and the provider return us a "billing id" that only we can use. For others the services provider embed coding within our page that encrypts data before it is submitted, it goes straight though our site to theirs for decrypting and payment collection similarly with us never knowing the card details (it gets encrypted then encrypted again by SSL, we only see the SSL decrypted version which is still encrypted).

You obviously have to administer the reason for collecting payment - such as removing ads from fee paying users.

You made the short list

Well done

Yeah, third party processing so that LZ doesn't take on any risk for GDPR and PCI-DSS. Can even hook through Stripe or PayPal (or countless others)
Setting that up is easy and straightforward

Ok chaps, we now have an option to help the site out which enables you to opt out of ads and other such things... announcement in news section here. It's just a Full Member subscription for a year which will really help us out. The bigger contributors also get these perks at over 10,000 posts, so hopefully everyone can be happy with this solution. @accynina is running it all, so if you have any questions let her know.