To donate or Not to donate?

[evgwheel]

At present this site is ssslowww!!! I agree that advertising may need to be considered to get more bandwidth and new equipment. or change the site to another provider site.
It is OK if we have slow connections to this site sometimes, but it seems to happen more frequently.
Any suggestions (if Scott agrees) how to get advertisers to pay for space on this site and what form of advertising would be acceptable to most members? Just because most of us are dirty old man, please not those adds. As for Scott, thank you for doing so well on a limited budget, and a expending membership.
This is by no means an attempt to downgrade this great website.

[rlortie]

Edit:

Double post: why, because of what EVG states above. I also received a list of error header messages half a page long.

Ralph

[rlortie]

The problem isn't the money. The problem is that in essence, the information is free.. I don't believe that "forcing" people to pay is a good solution ..

I do not think anyone is forcing you or any other member to donate. IF Scott decides (due to maintenance costs) to block those who do not donate from certain areas, and you do not think it is worth admission then that is your choice.

There is an old proverb popular with us some of us older generations:
"You cannot dance unless you pay the band"... Sure, you pay your IP service to gain access to the internet. From there you have your own discretion as to what you link too. I am sure that Scott is paying for his IP service as well. He may have his own server but that does not give him free access to WWW.

The web is not free and none of the services offered are free, some one is paying either by advertising or by subscription. While Google web searching I am running into more and more educational and college links that require you purchase a subscription.

AS for the post by Fletcher, I usually pass information by copy and pasting it into another forum or private post, with recognition of where it is from. I have done this with members of other forums many times, some have responded by coming here and having a look for themselves.

Ralph

[evgwheel]

https://www.google.com/adsense/login/en_US/
Google's famous AdSense program uses a very clever program to look through your website to determine what it's about, and then displays only ads which are most likely to be of interest to your visitors. Basically all the hard work is done for you. Then, when a visitor to your website finds the ad interesting and clicks on it, your account is credited with a few cents

Tried posting this 4 times this morning, something needs to be done. The foot has outgrown the shoe. That is called progress.

Reminds me of phone calls, with a message "Your call is important to us"

[rlortie]

Took you four times to post it and I timed out twice and had to back click and refresh to open it!

I agree, It gets even more frustrating when you make a number of attempts to open a new post only to find that it a smiley face or something similar. Even putting up with advertising would be less obnoxious.

Have you ever timed out trying log out? I have!

Scott,

What can consciences members do to assist you in the performance of this forum?

Ralph

Timed out on first try at submitting this!

[rlortie]

Look familiar;

Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to smtp.viawest.net:25 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond. ) in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\besslerwheel\forum\includes\smtp.php on line 110

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\besslerwheel\forum\includes\smtp.php:110) in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\besslerwheel\forum\includes\page_header.php on line 1004

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\besslerwheel\forum\includes\smtp.php:110) in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\besslerwheel\forum\includes\page_header.php on line 1006

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\besslerwheel\forum\includes\smtp.php:110) in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\besslerwheel\forum\includes\page_header.php on line 1007

[rlortie]

Edit:

Another double post of the above. plus another "time out"

[evgwheel]

Scott is your server connected by cable or phone line (through sub-station)?

[evgwheel]

....Make your vote count, scroll to top of page.....
Oops, this should have been included in post above (my mistake)

Fletcher wrote (in other post) Related to slow login;

It's coin operated - put some more money in slot & it will speed up - see paypal donate button below ;)

And I thought you were joking, but it is working, back to normal.

[LustInBlack]

Ralph, should I pay for a slow forum !? .. ;]
Joking ..

I only reply giving my line of thought ..
The INFORMATION is free .. The servers cost money ..

My friend have his own server and doesn't pay a cent, he has his server in his appartment and have enough bandwidth to do with it without spending money.. A domain name cost almost nothing ...

I don't see when Scott said that he needed money ... Maybe I didn't saw the topic..


Anyways..

[rmd3]

Would you like to moderate this bunch of folk (let alone the technical mumbo-jumbo of running the site)? Not I. A donation to Scott is to compensate him for dealing with the coherent and incoherent posts/people, and especially the banned or about-to-be-banned members!

Idea: Maybe a gift of bandwidth could be given to the doner in proportion to the donation amount - donate more, get better access?

-Randall

[Gregory]

You going to laugh on it, I am sure, but I don't already have a paypal account. Looks like I going to make it very soon.

I would hate to donate 1$ per month. If payment will be voted, I would rather donate 12$ per year in one sum, that is less trouble.

But it may be possible, that cleaning up the members and remove those who never posted, and more likely to limit the number of guests can have access and watch the site simultaneously, would be a very good idea to save bandwidth. Correct?

There can be far too many guests at certain times, I think, even without considering robots.

[daxwc]

I might be a little naive to what the site costs to maintain. I would gladly donate if I knew what it costs per year to operate. Please Scott could you give a guess to the amount for us people who are not computer savvy?

[evgwheel]

Daxwc
It may be irrelevant what Scott pays at the moment to maintain his equipment, it is more relevant what he has to spend in the next year to cater for the ever more traffic to his site. As far as I know a server can only handle XXXX amount of traffic, depending on his computer equipment and how he connects to the internet, only so much traffic can go through a phone line and more traffic through a cable, but there is a limit before it slows down. So for improvement to this site, he would in my opinion need to upgrade his equipment constantly (bigger) and double every thing he has got, so he runs a separate backup system to work on when the other fails and get more bandwidth from his provider through extra connections.(like having 5 phone lines to your house) Battery backup packs are very expensive)) It is a bit like your road network, if they don’t build better and bigger road, we will all be in a traffic jam.
....Make your vote count, scroll to top of page.....

[scott]

Look familiar;

Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to smtp.viawest.net:25

Hi Ralph, that does look familiar and it has to do with my ISPs mail server being down yesterday. I noticed it when I tried to get my own email. Whenever you post to a topic, emails are sent out to whoever has subscribed to watch that topic. When the mail server is down it can cause problems like you all saw yesterday. It appears to be fixed now.

-Scott