It's That Time Of Year Again

[Cees Donker]

Taking a look at who's online, I see 32 users of which 10 in red, and the others in blue. That means that 22 people are depending on the money of these 10 paying members. Come on guys, let's keep this site going! Donate if you can?

Kind regards,

Cees

[Daube]

Let's avoid these kind of comments which makes people feel guilty.

From my side, it appears PayPal has created an account for me, although I never registered there... (and I don't have the registration emails anywhere).
That means I'll be able to donate soon.

[huub vink]

Daube, I agree, we shouldn't make the donation drive a personal thing. However I can fully understand the frustration from Cees.

The SOH has 22,898 members, from who 4,395 are considered "active members". So far 251 donations have been received in the 2016 drive. And there are several members who already have donated several times!

So roughly so far only 240 members have donated in this drive, which is less than 6% of our members!

I think SOH is unique, due to the mixture of developers, (re)painters and users, and the fact that the members facilitate their own meeting place.

Therefore I personally think SOH is worth a small donation. But I think the figures show that not everybody shares my opinion. So far not even 6% of the members have covered more than half the costs to keep the SOH online. It shouldn't be so hard for the other 94% of the members to cover the other half........

When we can't raise the required money to pay the bills, the result is simple: There won't be a Sim-Outhouse anymore.

Regards,
Huub

[Blade124]

I can't find anywhere the amount that is trying to get raised, just a bar at the top. Where is the amount listed?

[huub vink]

Scott, we are trying to raise 11,000 USD, to keep both servers running. So far we have received 5,900 USD. The .com server with the library needs quite some bandwith and we have had some problems with the hard-disks which needed to be replaced. And sad enough, a part of the money is of course already gone to Paypal before it arrives at the SOH.

I can see the amounts just above the indication bar. I think you should be able to see it as well.

Cheers,
Huub

[Daube]

My donation should be done now. Please let me know in case something went wrong.
For info, there were two attempts from me, the first one was aborted because I needed to update some info in my Paypal account. I received the confirmation MP from Ickie nevertheless.
The second attempt must have been successful though.

PS: in 'My Contributions' above the progress bar, I can see two payments. There was only one in reality. Only the second one was really executed in Paypal.
I think that's a small glitch in the SOH part: it registers the payment as soon as you jump to the Paypal webpage, but it does not consider if you really executed the payment in Paypal or not.

[huub vink]

Thanks for your donation. I will ask Ickie to check what actually has been transferred. I can see only one donation.

Cheers,
Huub

[Ickie]

only 1 went threw for $40 thanks

[big-mike]

Huub,
you and the staff at SOH should probably think about other ways to keep SOH alive.
I always made my donation and this year i was normally not able to do so.
I am not very active(my poor english),but i am here every day to keep me informed.
During the past year i was retired,because i`m so sick that i cannot work any longer and the money i get is more than a shame,i need social help now.
But SOH gives me so much and i have learned so many things and i understand that there is no free lunch anywhere.
I really hope that SOH will be online for another year.
Mike

[huub vink]

Mike, I understand your concerns. We have discussed other options already many times. One of the options is to close the .net server, which is used as our back-up and on-line flying server. As we would like to host flying events and have a lot of members who enjoy on-line flying this is an option we haven't chosen so far.

An other option would be sponsorship. This raises two questions: Who is willing to invest the needed amount of money in an independent forum and are there sufficient commercial parties willing to invest money in a shrinking flightsim world?

As said so far not even 6% of our "active members" have donated something. With the amount of members we have it crowd-funding really shouldn't be a problem. I think the main challenge is to make people aware that when we don't succeed to raise the money, the SOH will end.

Cheers,
Huub

[JensOle]

Or as a more drastic move, make access to the site/part of it dependant of a donation. Then there would be no free rides and if SoH really matters people will need to donate in order to get access.

The problem is all the people taking a free ride here and not helping out. Many pays large sums for addons, but a donation for their favourite sim site is rather difficult. If everybody saves one or two addons and spend the money on the SoH I'm sure we had not had this discussion.

For me it was an easy decision to support my favourite FS site even if I'm currently living on a student income. Priorities.

[Rami]

Or as a more drastic move, make access to the site/part of it dependant of a donation. Then there would be no free rides and if SoH really matters people will need to donate in order to get access.

The problem is all the people taking a free ride here and not helping out. Many pays large sums for addons, but a donation for their favourite sim site is rather difficult. If everybody saves one or two addons and spend the money on the SoH I'm sure we had not had this discussion.

For me it was an easy decision to support my favourite FS site even if I'm currently living on a student income. Priorities.

JensOle,

The problem with that argument is that if you look at the readme files for a lot of the downloads, it is specifically noted that those uploads are forbidden from being hosted by a website that requires payment for downloads. To do your suggestion, I would have to comb through every file in the library and remove all those files which stipulate such a demand.

That is especially true with CFS2, where I work and play.

[JensOle]

I understand the legal aspect. Maybe making the addon library available without donating, but with lower download speed (as seen on most of the bigger sites), but the other features for members only.

[Rami]

JensOle,

Throttling has been discussed.

[Cees Donker]

Let's avoid these kind of comments which makes people feel guilty.

"Donate if you can?" shouldn't make people feel guilty but aware, dear Daube. Nothing more. But the amount of freeware and good advice you can get here, is priceless.




Cees

[Daube]

And what about advertisment only on the dowload pages ?
A user going through the forums would not see any ads until he navigates to the library, where he would see a few... But I don't know how much money that would bring...

[Blade124]

It may be a permissions thing, as no amount is listed.

Are you guys spending $11,000 a year to keep a server or two going? You can definitely get a load of bandwidth and servers for a fraction of that cost. Take a peek here:
https://www.godaddy.com/pro/dedicate...pro_ds_managed

$210 / mo gets you a dedicated 32GB server and 2TB storage.

You have full remote access to your own dedicated server.

Scott.

[glh]

It may be a permissions thing, as no amount is listed.

Are you guys spending $11,000 a year to keep a server or two going? You can definitely get a load of bandwidth and servers for a fraction of that cost. Take a peek here:
https://www.godaddy.com/pro/dedicate...pro_ds_managed

$210 / mo gets you a dedicated 32GB server and 2TB storage.

You have full remote access to your own dedicated server.

Scott.

It would be interesting to read what the admins think of this possibility.

[huub vink]

Scott, thanks for the link. I will forward it to the guys who are dealing with the servers. To reduce costs we have already looked into other possibilities several items. These services often seem cheap, however when you need anything outside the standard package suddenly they aren’t that cheap any more. The main issue is compatibility. They offer a standard service on their conditions, when you don’t fit in their offer you have a problem.

In general they only offer bandwidth and storage. These services do not include the software needed to run the forum and the library, nor the required service to keep them running. Also the security in their offer is very limited and doesn’t cover the data exchange to and from our library and of the forums.

But it is definitely worth to look at it. However that doesn't change the fact we still need to pay for services, so we still depend on the generosity of our members to stay alive. So your donation is still more than welcome.

Regards,
Huub

[Ickie]

first off the $11,000 = really = $9500 after credit card fees and paypal fees
we have 2 top line servers 1 linux and the other a windows, I pay M$ a monthly fee for windows OS, These are not the bottom line servers. We also have a free work agreement when it breaks with server company in Texas. We also have 100 gb per second connection, not the 10 gig most offer.

Remember you can buy a cheep computer for $100, but to run FSX you need to spend more, lol

I also hire a 24/7, the smart ones who manage the tec part of the server.

I have been down this road of being cheep, I have been doing the server thing since 1998, believe me, what we have is the best.