Many thankyous for your donation @hixy

Very much appreciated when members like cover or contribute to the running costs. 

Happy to help :)

No donations so far this year guys, the funds have dried up.
Don't worry I'll always fund this place when I needed, but it's nice when users' contributions cover it. 

Traffic has gone up this year again so far too. 837 guests and 60 members showing online now! Usually hovering around 4 to 5 hundred. 

Also, been looking at how Reddit do it, they have a daily % costs covered score. Daily is far too much for here, it'd likely be monthly, but it'd be a good visual indicator. I'm just looking into the Google Cloud API at how I can get the current balance and work something out to display a percent funded widget somewhere.  Several members have suggested this in the past, but other than wikipedia, I've not seen many popular user generated content sites implement it well, but Reddit seem to make it work.

Hope my donation helps with the upkeep guys!

Your donation Sam is the single biggest single contribution we've ever received, that's not far off covered us for a month alone! So thanks very much.
 I never cease to be amazed by the generosity of the members here. 

We're using cloud based server(s) and so the cost scales with the activity, which is excellent if it's quiet, and as we're UK based predominantly means costs scale down through the night, it does also mean when it gets busier the costs go up too.

Normally with ad funded forums and websites that's not a problem because if traffic and usage goes up ad revenue does too, with a donation based running cost offset model, that won't happen as the bulk of the traffic is from new members and guests who aren't likely to donate, and if they do it'll be a small contribution as they at that point perceive low value in the forum.

There's many facets to it which I'm really only just learning, but the dream of this place being fully crowd funded doesn't seem very far fetched.

Thanks HK for your subscription based contribution, I didn't even know if that works, but it came through so many thanks.

 

Interesting. Isn't it like a DD, I.e, comes out on a specific date?

@Mike I called them, and they said you have to request the payment each month.  I don't know if you can set something up that automatically asks to collect from anyone who has set up a recurring donation or not?  I got the impression it's just pre-authorised to release funds which I have set up to a certain value to be released each month, but only IF you request it.