Supporting Forum Hosting Costs

[Alex]

Hi Community, I started this forum 15 years ago and it has grown to be a great resource for new and existing Basenji owners thanks to all of your contributions.

I have hosted this forum on my own servers for many years and customized community software to meet the needs of the growing community, as software development is one of my passions, and essentially just costs me time. In the last 5 years though between taking care of my family and two senior Basenjis there was not much time left for maintaining the forum software, so I ended up switching to a fully managed forum service from nodebb.org. The cost of this service is about $250-300/month depending on the traffic and email volume. I have paid this out of pocket for 5 years, but unfortunately, my personal situation, as many of you can relate to during the pandemic, no longer allows me this type of expense.

I am talking with other forum owners and exploring a few options like Ads for non-registered users (you will probably see some of them soon), Patreon which will enable any user of the forum to set up a small monthly donation towards the hosting costs.

I don't think the options above are going to be sufficient as we would need much higher user and traffic volume to raise this much monthly, so feel free to private message me and let me know if you have other ideas. I will continue paying for the forum out of pocket, but ideally, I get some relief soon.

Thanks,

[blkavatr]

Alex, first, thank you so much for organizing this community and shouldering the cost. It's been really helpful for me as I prepared to get a Basenji and now, as I have one.

Please keep us posted as to how we can support, I'll also look out for the Patreon link. If it becomes too much to maintain this site, the only other idea I can think of is maybe moving the forum to a Facebook Group?

[DebraDownSouth]

Alex, why not put the ads for everyone? If it helps raise more money, I personally don't mind the ads.

I love the new format.

[Alex]

@debradownsouth I have enabled ads for non-registered users, as I believe these users generate the bulk of the web traffic just by looking up information on Basenjis. If that is not enough, then I will run an experiment to do it for everyone and see if that helps, but initially did not want to deter long-time users from using the site because of the annoyance of ads, I am not a fan myself. Thanks for the feedback on the new format, I should have enabled it sooner, it was kind of a forced update by the provider and I am glad we did it.

[Alex]

@blkavatr Thank you for the kind words, I'm writing up a post about how the community users can help. Thanks for the suggestion, we have a facebook page https://www.facebook.com/basenjiforums/, but facebook in my opinion does not have the best user experience for organizing communities, 15 years of content would be lost and it is not searchable outside of Facebook. It's an option though that I will consider if all else fails.

[Zande]

@alex I eschew Facebook - but find the Forums relaxing and a pleasant escape from the on-going slog of the database !

I prefer no adverts, but if that is what it takes, I'm OK with them. Many thanks for providing this facility.

[marta5]

This post is deleted!

[Alex]

I'm happy to report that ads for non-registered users are supporting 50% of the hosting costs of this forum, which is a great help.

[elbrant]

Good to hear!