Annual Fan Forum Fundraiser

[Brian the Automator]

Hey all,

 

It's been a little over a year since we had our last Fan Forum fundraiser. We're fortunate enough to have had the donations power the message board for just over one year now, but we're just about out of page views. I've activated the "Want to contribute? - Brewerfan.net Fundraiser" link on the main forum page. Anyone can contribute there using PayPal. There are several levels of payments (6, 18, 30, and 54 dollars) which as a result give us a certain number of page views. You can also write in a separate amount.

 

So, if you feel like Brewerfan's Fan Forum is a valuable resource for you, please think about supporting it with a contribution. Last year we had 32 donors contributing a total of $800, so that's the amount I'm shooting for this year since it worked well last year.

 

Thanks for your support!

 

Total so far: $824 of $800

[1992casey]

I've activated the "Want

to contribute? - Brewerfan.net Fundraiser"

The link also works here in the thread. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

 

Note that contributions also give you some free Yuku Supporter days. The number of Supporter days you receive is based on the size of your contribution. If you're a Yuku Supporter, Brewerfan and LambeauLeap won't be charged for your page views. Also, your Yuku experience will be ad-free across the system. That might be handy for those of you who frequent BPS, which is ad-supported.

 

If you'd like, it's also possible to purchase Yuku Supporter separately. To check your Supporter status or to purchase Supporter separately:

1. Hit the Navigation button in the upper left corner of any board page.
2. Hit the Yuku Supporter link in the Account box that appears on the left-hand side.

[jjkoestler]

Happy to help. Thank you Brian, Casey, and mods for all that you do.

[carniesandrubes]

IMO, those funds would be better used for hosting for a self-run and self-owned forum using something like vBulletin. With the amount of traffic the board gets, a VPS would easily be robust enough to handlemboth BF and LL. Plus you wouldn't be held hostage by Yuku every year like this.

[1992casey]

The main issue regarding a potential switch is that it can't be done without a lot of thought and planning. If the board is going to be self-hosted or set up on another system, we have to be absolutely sure that the grass is going to be greener on the other side of the fence. In other words, we'd need to do our homework.

 

Moving the membership would be no easy task; it would have to be done from scratch. Careful planning would have to be done by Brian, the administrators, and the moderators in order make that happen as smoothly as possible.

 

We've certainly had issues with Yuku. There's no debating that. I think it's fair to say that over the next year, we'll be weighing our options.

 

One thing that's still good about Yuku is the way it's funded. We have total control over how much money Yuku gets, meaning that members can rest assured that any money that goes to Yuku will be used.

[Brian the Automator]

We have and are exploring alternatives to fan forum software, but one of the things that have always been a deterrent in my mind are open source message boards getting hacked frequently. That's pretty much my worst-case scenario.

 

The other thing that even with all of Yuku's faults, they generally scale pretty well. It's been a while and infrequent when brewerfan's been dog-slow. Most hosting solutions give you a pretty minimal amount of CPU and RAM, but Yuku will scale up accordingly. There are some "cloud" solutions out there now that let you host sites and scale up and down the number of servers and resources you can use (and some can do it dynamically), but I'm not comfortable enough with hosting message boards on those solutions quite yet to make the plunge.

 

We are looking into other options though, because I do realize that Yuku costs about $67 a month, and I think we can maybe bring that down by $20 a month or so perhaps.

[Brian the Automator]

We exceeded our goal by $24! I'd like to personally thank everyone who donated to this cause. Hopefully this will keep us rolling for an entire year of fan forum usage. Thanks again!