Hey guys, I know this was a long one, and unfortunately I was unable to address it for a few days with travel + family priorities.
For the moment, we're good to go but I won't sugarcoat it: the forum is financially and technically on life support. Right now, the cost of running the site is becoming untenable as it's personally out of pocket and adding up to real amounts -- I personally host and pay for the site and am on the hook if an overage one month suddenly requires $500+ to avoid servers being taken down, which is essentially what happened this week. The ads help but are now consistently and significantly below the overhead, not counting any time spent on technical issue of course.
I am open to the community feedback on how to proceed. I don't mind fixing things here and there just as my own contribution to keeping the forum alive, but like most of us here can't afford an extra 3-4 figure liability (try explaining that to your spouse!).
Some options would be to accept donations / GoFundMe etc and basically spread out some of the costs, but it might be more than others are hoping to spend to access the site which is intended to be free and self-sustaining.
Alternatively, finding a Boston (or any) business to fully sponsor the site, I would do the work to integrate their sponsored graphics and replace the current ad setup. This would be a bit more expensive, because it will need to replace both the current ad revenue, and the costs beyond that.
I don't have precise numbers for any of this, as both sides of the checkbook have evolved over the past 1-2 years (ad revenue has steadily declined, while hosting costs have increased), but we're talking a few grand per year combined with volunteer help (meaning my own technically support and of course the mods).
Finally, I'm open to passing the site to a new owner who feels they can take the reins. I should caution that it is not a straightforward hosting situation. You will need the ability to self-host a database, manage load / costs, fix occasional errors, maintain verrrrry old PHP code at times, etc. But, I will share everything I know if there is a party that wishes to try.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, and I do hope for a solution.
- byennie
Topic: Forum Outages (Read 4580 times)