Forum Crashing, Donations and more subscribers welcome

That's because you pay monthly. Transaction fees at 3.49% + 49p and then there can then be some other fees such as currency fees so anything below £1 just isn't worth it and can even cost more than you receive. Even though you pay a little more Karl gets less overall than those who pay yearly

 

The problem with forums that require you to register/login to view is the crawlers can't access the content and that has a two fold impact

1. The search engines can't crawl the content. If it can't be crawled it can't be properly indexed so the site will sink in the search engine results. While we are only 3rd page for the search term 'Bradford City" as the clubs own stuff dominates that, and then the likes of Sky, BBC, T&A and some of the big football sites plus Bradford City Council have better SEO, we do rank higher on a number of other keywords and it does drive traffic
2. The Ad Crawler can also only crawl certain pages. If it can't crawl a page it can't place an ads on it. And many of the pages viewable without logging in on a members only forum are disallowed by Google from having ads on them and we have to specifically block them being crawled by googles adbot in the robots.txt file.

Should also be noted that the percentage of users detected as running an adblocker is a much lower percentage amongst logged out users than logged in ones. So not only do we serve them more ads they are much more likely to see the ad and hence generate revenue where as the logged in users who aren't subscribing and should be seeing ads are less likely to see ads and generate less per capita than the logged out ones

 

Increasing the price isn't easy because of the way the subscription system and PayPal work. For people who manually pay each year it wouldn't be a problem but many people use a recurring payment. Due to the way PayPal works we are not able to cancel a recurring payment and we also can't increase the price. if we change the price of the subscription though the system won't recognise that what the payment for and won't upgrade the user.

Since the forum launched we have seen the ad market shrink while especially post Covid with everything that has gone on in the world costs have rocketed. Obviously energy prices which web servers use a fair amount of (both directly but also because they have to reside in climate controlled buildings because heat is bad for electronics and if things like CPU's get too hot they throttle) have shot up while while alot of electronics have gone up because distributing them has gone up in a number of areas. Plus while I manage all the software on our server, it's in a data centre that needs staff to look after the hardware and the cost of living crisis means they are more expensive hire.

So asking for more to subscribe would in theory make sense if it wasn't so problematic to do so.

Plus obviously you also have to consider that its a small subset that do subscribe, if prices were raised by say 50% would that result in over 50% stopping subscribing thus the higher price generates less and that's hard to tell. You would think everyone who uses that forum atleast once a week for over 15mins would find it holds 85p a month value at its current price but the majority find that too high and even those who do sub will have a level where they personally think its not work it and each person that level will be different.

All we could potentially do is create a new sub level with a new price and if people want to then cancel their recurring sub and sub to the new one they could. However as that would be voluntary it is probably just better that if anyone wants to they make a donation.

And as you were asking where to do this. If you go on the front page where the listing of the different forums are its in the side bar. Although you can also access it directly at https://bantamtalk.com/index.php?donations/support-the-forum.5/campaign

 

Ultimately that has to be a decision for KK to make but speaking personally, it isn't a suggestion I could support.

Relying on the club to help would be a step in the wrong direction. It would change the role of the site dramatically since it prides itself on being independent which of course implies being independent of the club. The site embraces a wide range of views relating to many aspects of the club, both on and off the pitch. I'd want that to remain and continue to be a cornerstone of this site. Once the club started to have a financial interest in the site, it would no longer be independent. It would be a small step then for the club to impart its own thinking on the site and to potentially limit criticism of the club in return for its financial help. That would imo be a disaster and it wouldn't be long before BT went the way of the OMB after posters on there started to criticise certain individuals at the club.

To safeguard the longevity of the site and to keep it relevant to a growing number of members will inevitably require some investment to update the software and its platform. Rather than rely on the club to help with the funding, I trust that more posters will dip into their own pockets for a tenner to help the site to fluorish and develop. It's a small price to pay.

 

It's something I've considered before not least because even though I have automated more and more of it to save me time it does still take up a decent amount of my time and its all done in my own time and at my own expense.

The problem is when we have 30-60 people playing every week its worth while but if we require payment and its now 5-10 people is there really much point in it. There is also the fact that either it requires more time from me again to filter out those who haven't paid or we have to hide it from general view and the prediction league threads are actually fairly good for SEO, in a number of good keywords for us the prediction league threads are highly ranked which drives traffic (and again we couldn't run ads on them either in that situation and better SEO pages have better RPM rates, some of the prediction league threads have an RPM 4 times sites average for example)

I've thought a few times about if there is a way to 'upsell' the prediction league so everyone can play for free but they can pay for an enhancement but I've never been able to think of an upsell that works. For example at one point I was trying to thinking maybe rather than accumulated score we could do it on average score and paid people would have their worst x number of scores discarded which would boost their average but I did some tests on some old data and it suggested we would get about 8 people in first place every time