Forum Crashing, Donations and more subscribers welcome

With many of them it's like comparing Apples and Oranges.

For example alot of them run on Pro-boards which is a free platform to setup a forum on but nothing is actually free. First of all they run ads with the money going to pro-boards. They also take ownership of all users data and posts which by signing up you agree them to monetise in anyway they wish. For forum owners they charge $10 a month for some fairly basic features such as a custom domain name. They then charge $6 to remove ads for 50,000 page views. To give you an idea since 25th March to today we have had 370,000 page views so Karl would have need to pay $48 to prevent you seeing ads and he would actually never know for certain how much each month was going to cost him. They also upsell the users for features as well so pro-boards are quadruple dipping, they are getting ad revenue, are making money of users data/posts, getting money of the forum operator and getting money off the users. And they will just delete a forum if they decide it breaks policy, especially if you decide you have outgrown pro boards, they offer no way to officially export data so you have to use a scraping method and they have deleted forums when they have detected that and they have also threatened other forum companies to cancel software licences if they find out later. Overall they are a pretty scummy company

You then also have others who are actually part of bigger networks. There are a number of benefits to this. The first being maintenance. I have a couple of clients who have networks of sites. If I need to update PHP or mySQL on these networks it's a single command line to update the 10+ sites in that network and a single command line to update this single site. Same if I'm updating the platform be it Xenforo like here or Wordpress of one of these networks, its one command line to update all the sites and one to update this one. And it also allows some sites to subsidise others. Lets say I have a network of 2 sites, one a Man Utd forum and one a Salford one. Not only does the money from the Man Utd one almost certainly help pay for the costs of the Salford one but the United one will open up revenue opportunities for both that are worth much more. And the more sites the more combined views, the bigger the range of demos and the more appealing you are to people who want to promote their products or services directly on your network

And some are run as advertising for other businesses of the operator either by directly driving business or just being good for SEO to their main business so shouldering the costs doesn't matter to them if its driving enough traffic to their other business.

Some of them are also pretty dead. One I checked at around 8pm had 3 posts all day and at this moment they don't even have a single logged in user online. That's instantly going to be much cheaper. They could probably run it on cheap shared hosting from places like Godaddy where as thats not an option for us, while these cheap hosting sell themselves as unlimited in reality they have a limits on both file numbers and database size, we exceed both of these 'fair usage' figures massively.

And thats the thing, every site is different and has different concerns and hence how best to deal with these concerns is different. In an ideal world RPM rates would be much higher on ads allowing for fewer per page, fewer people would run adblockers that operate on a policy of blacklisting everything and requiring you to whitelist ones you want though (Everything being whitelisted and then having to choose to add a site to a blacklist is better. People don't think 'The ads on this site are fine so I'll whitelist' them as they never see the ads due to the adblocker. Where as if they have to see the ads first and decide if its worthy of a block thats better and it gives encouragement to the ad sellers, ad networks and sites to be more considerate with the amount and style of the ads as income and RPM will increase) and if people really hated ads so much that they needed to block them then more open to using ad free options if available, especially if its affordable

 

One of my clients has only just stopped paying me via postal orders. He refused to use his card online so wouldn't trust using either the credit card gateway on my invoice system or PayPal and refused to trust his banking app. And he also wasn't happy sending cheques as he had seen programme about criminals being able to erase pen and write in new details. Thankfully he finally has learnt to trust his banking app and pays via a bank transfer now but they were a massive pain. That seems to be why they still exist though as there are people, mainly on the older side who have seen all the scare stories about more modern payment methods and refuse to us them

 

We are probably not that far away from a point that won't be an issue.

With my Crypto I have a hardware wallet that I hook upto my computer, install the apps for each crypto currency and then transfer the crypto to this wallet. When I want to use my Crypto I do so using this device where the service I'm trying to use the crypto on communicates with this wallet, I have to enter my encryption code on the device and the transaction is made.

And I feel we aren't far from having similar wallets embedded in our hand but rather than just dealing with crypto we will from our computer or phone connect to it and install any payment gateway we use, be it crypto wallets, or services like Google or Apple Pay or services like Curve that allow us to combine all our cards into one master card or Paypal/Cashapp or even apps supplied by our banks to directly use our credit and debit cards. So it won't matter of we leave our phone, cards or cash at home, we will always have our payment methods on us