Jack-Flash-Jr
I for one would be willing to contribute a nominal amount every now and then toward keeping the site healthy - I donate to wikipedia and am happy to do so. The odd voluntary contribution might be worth setting a mechanism up. I honestly don't know how much running the site costs but maybe a VOLUNTARY donation structure with suggested amounts would work?
I think we covered this some time ago but throwing it out there (kinda like the site is throwing out banner ads at me when I'm not logged in.... as an aside, I would be reluctant to register if i thought the ads were regular feature on the site).
edit: the sheer amount of daily info and entertainment value we get out of GFSA is surely equivalent to the the cost of renting a couple of DVDs every now and then.
edit2: it would have to be a no pressure/anonymous maybe system as well, not everyone might be able to donate, even if they are willing.
ezietsman
Yeah I would also give a donation from time to time. I don't think GFSA should become a paid-for site, but JFJ is prob right, for the cost of a night or two's drinking from a bunch of us we can prob keep this site running for a while ?
Manfred-Klose
if it can work via paypal somehow, then i will also donate
Ray
I wouldnt mind donating some but I seem to have missed the banner ad problem. Everyone advertizes. And anyway, I dont believe that the conception and maintenance of the site is for any benevolent reasons. If I am wrong, then I am sorry. But when you put a site like this together then surely the aim is to have some sort of passive income from it. Because4 there must be some time and effort and admin and such involved. And the obvious place for that is these advertizing banner things. At one time there was a bikini girls thing and just as I was going to get involved it stopped coming up here. I'm going to be seriously upset if the 5 guitar loving girls also disappear.
Yes and I've just seen Joel's suggestion which sounds quite fine to me. AGF has something like that as well. And they have sponsors. So when you post it doesnt come up and say I'm a hero member or senior member, it says I'm an AGF sponsor.
Psean
Jack Flash Jr wrote:
the sheer amount of daily info and entertainment value we get out of GFSA is surely equivalent to the the cost of renting a couple of DVDs every now and then.
Very good point ?
I think the voluntary donations idea is quite a good one.
AlanRatcliffe
One thing neither of us ever want to do is limit access to any features on the site. We are also not keen on any kind of paid subscription or donorship model.
Ray is right in that we are here to more than just cover costs, we want to grow and that will take more than covering costs. I will, however, say that I would be here regardless, but the more the site grows and the more it earns me, the more I can justify spending more time and effort in growing it still further.
I'm also not mad about some of the advertising we have been getting and will be looking at what we can do about that (and I certainly don't want the site to end up looking like a billboard). But we will be trying to find the right balance where we can turn a reasonable profit and grow without making the site unusable or kill it in the long run.
Ray
So I'm thinking that lots of the traffic on this site is by unregistered people. They pop in and they look around and they check if they dig what they see and read. And next week or month they do the same. And then maybe they say let me join and drop in a post or two and see what that scares up. And maybe they dont join. Whatever. But I am thinking that you could perhaps investigate a tiered model (like uncle Joel suggested). I play correspondence chess on a site that has something like that. You pay and you see less ads. You dont pay and you see more ads. sometimes many more ads. One little problem is that some of the guys (or girls) I play against are incarcerated somewhere and they dont pay for the site use but they sure as hell dont give the advertizer too much mileage either.
But another thing I was thinking now that my attention is drawn is that I only see two ads popping up. the 5 women and a dre headphones thing. Could that be becasue other advertizers have seen that there are very little hits from this site? In that case I think we should hit these ads and increase the hits and other advertizers may pull in. Tell you what! I am willing to take one for the team and go scout around for the 5 women. Joel, you go check out the headphones.
Sean
Must say, I also wouldn't mind the voluntary donation option either.
Jack-Flash-Jr
Alan, I'm not sure why you're not keen on a donorship model. I would NOT like it to be in order to access privileged parts of the site (because that will ultimately result in less readers I think plus elitist stuff puts me off - your 'status' on GFSA should be based on contributions post wise and the 'thanks' button is a nice badge) but rather a pure vote of thanks like with Wikipedia (non-profit yes but the value to users for income to owners ratio on GFSA must be virtually non-profit anyway)
The ad people are referring to is the very obtrusive pop up (which for some reason takes time to load) that for me anyway is a collection of music humour that you get before signing in (and every few clicks if you don't sign in). I would like to see this particular ad gone but whether it and others stay or go I'd still like a donate mechanism simply because it's another way of saying thanks.
aja
How about selling high quality accessories like guitar leads and letting the proceeds go to the site costs?
A "GFSA" brand may be an interesting adventure.
The GFSA coffee mugs did quite well considering that it was just a once off endeavor for fun only.
Big-G
When I was a moderator on another site, we had a setup where any topic related businesses, in this case Guitar/musical instrument selling businesses, would pay a 'sponsors' fee to the site, and in return would get a banner with their company logo etc on the top of the page, and would also have their own sub forum which allowed them to plug their product, and offer 'specials' to the forum members. Perhaps such a setup would work well here?
Regards
G!
AlanRatcliffe
OK. I don't see the problem ad at all, but if it's causing login problems, it will have to go ASAP. I also am not wild with the quality of the ads our new ad service is bringing in.
We're busy discussing what we can do now. Thanks everyone for your input, but thread closed for now.
If you have any more problems with ads, please PM me or if you have login issues, email me at alan(AT)guitarforum(DOT)co(DOT)za
NorioDS
Chiming in quickly,
The popup was only supposed to be seen by "anonymous" visitors. It's not cool that it annoyed (and effectively blocked) some of our valued members. It's not going away but I've changed it to only show once a day, per computer/browser you log in at. That should fix 90% of the problems.
