Admin

There was a major error with the database-process on the server last night. This has probably been dormant and/or building up for a couple of weeks. Backed up the database real quick, rebooted the server, installed the database again and optimized it and things should be smoother now.

Yes it is. We will also be implementing many of the excellent suggestions we got over the next couple of days

I would like to send a big "Thank you!!" to all of the members who have contributed to us these last couple of days. The response has been nothing short of amazing. There are still some unaswered PM's about upgrading, etc. and I will get to you as soon as possible. If I have forgotten to send a BIG thank you to any of those who have been in touch with me via PM, I am very sorry. This is not intetntional, but I have literally gotten hundreds of PM's these last couple of days. So again, thank you to all of you out there who have contributed financially to RWG these last couple of days. I also think that a big thank you to the entire RWG community and to ALL members is in it's place, as you, the great people who are out there, are the ones that make RWG to what it is. Regards, Your humble admin

Well, this thread is going straigth to the dogs....

Just want to get a feel for what the general membership thinks would be a fair price to upgrade your membership and help us pay our expenses every month. All answers are anonymous, so please add your votes. Also, feel free to ad any further thoughts to this thread.

Will be posted later today or tomorrow Also, if as many as possible could fill out this poll: http://www.rwg.cc/members/index.php?showtopic=75099

Hmm...I don't think the missus would even allow it in the garage...Maybe in the glove compartment of my car, but just maybe

CC, it's cool. The link is visible to all members in the first post. Just another forum.....

Generous indeed and a very special item

As I have said before; there are many good suggestions here. I'm off to bed now, but I'll try to assemle a list of all the suggestions and put it up for discussion in the admin area. One thing is for sure; the supporters will be the first ones to know what we would like to do and they will also be involved in making the decisions.

I'll do my best to answer your questions; Dunno if this is a good answer, but this is how things are; The other forums have a completely different hosting setup thatn we have. They are either hosted on shared or VPS servers, located either in europe (repgeek) or in the in the US. RWG is hosted on 2 servers; 1 powerful dedicated server to handle all the traffic we get and a secondary server who acts like a reverse proxy to hide the identity of our main server. On top of this, our main server is hosted at a offshore datacentre. We pay a high premium for this, because offshort hosting is quite a bit more expensive than "regular" servers located anywhere in the world. Same thing goes for bandwidth. You don't get the same amount of bandwidth included in the price as you would elsewhere. But it is a good setup and it is a secure setup. Do we need this kind of setup? Well, that is a good question since it seems that both forums in the US and in europe don't have any problems. You tell me if we need this.

Thank you all. There are some wonderful ideas in this thread and I will for sure go for some of them. But you guys also need to keem a couple of things in the back of your mind: Yes, there is a very small percentage of members who pay to play, but the aother percentage is also what makes RWG what it is, like it or not. If we make this a pay-only board, we will loose big chunk of the members to other boards and this will decrease the quality of this board. I don't think a board where all members would have to pay would be a success, but I could of course be wrong. Re. recurring payments. I have no problems understanding that people have a problemw with this. These payments can easily be cancelled through paypal and we can provide detailed instructions on how this can be done. I don't mind charging a 1 year membership as a one time payment either. I guess my question here is if people are cool with paying $5 a month so that a year would be $60 or if they expect discounted memberships for a year? As someone mentioned above, it is the usual pattern on this kind of discussion; mostly members who are already supporters who post. I really wish the regular members would chime in here with both suggestions and their thoughts. But this is a good thread and a good discussion. Let's keep it up and together we'll find a permanent solution to this.

Let me just throw this out in to the discussion: Should we start compiling a list of 300+ members who are willing to donate to the forum on a monthly basis ($5 a month supporter memberships)? That way, we would have everything covered each month. If we get more supporters than that, I could get myself a couple of beers

Guys, I really do not want this to be a thread for bashing non-paying members or making members feel bad for not supporting this place. All the facts are right there in the first post, so people can make up their own minds, based on their own situation and economy. Hell, maybe people even needs to be pushed into donating, but I guess that would have to be my job? But I have to admin that I really wonder what it would take to get enough supporting members? $1 a month memberships or is it not about the price, but more about the principle or simply the fact that members can not afford to support this place? Another reason is of course the multiple forums that are out there who all require some sort of support and you just can support them all. Maybe another reason?

Forum created your request: http://www.rwg.cc/members/index.php?showforum=195 Please also read this thread: http://www.rwg.cc/members/index.php?showtopic=74906

As I have written in some posts before, we've had a bit of bad luck lately. Last week our last remaining payment option got closed down. Since the forum rely on supporting members, this is not very good. What made it worse was that all funds in my account will be held for 90 days. These funds were supposed to pay the hosting/license bill that is due in 4-5 days. So this basically means that I have to do something that I really hate to do; ask for your hard earned money. We have needed your support before and now we need it again. It is of course up to you to decide if you can afford to contribute or not. I will not push any members into this, but I will say this; we now have 11673 members here. Out of these, we have 467 paying supporters. That's about 4% of the members. Last year, this number was 7%! Now I am not saying that this number need to be as high as 7%. If it was that high, I would actually be making money from this forum, God forbid All I really want is enough supporters so that I; 1. Don't have to pay anything of the hosting bill myself. I do not like the fact that I have spent countless hours here and then I have to pay for all the work I have done. Last month I paid almost $500 out of my own pocket and since I don't have a steady income from my business yet, it really hurts in my wallet. 2. Don't have to worry about if we are going to have enough money to pay next months bills. And yes, I know that I created this forum, so why should I not pay for it myself? Well, if you think that's fair and all info on the Internet should be free and bla, bla, bla, then so be it. We all have our opinions and you are of course entitled to yours. So what are we going to do about this? Every time I post a post like this, there are several extremely generous members who step up and donate a lot of money. Already, a couple of these members have sent $100 each to help out this month and this is of course highly appreciated. But this forum is not for a few members. We have almost 12000 members here and all of these members use this server. They use it every time they read a post, load an image, send a PM, post a new post, etc. We are all responsible for the almost 400GB of bandwidth this server uses every month. And for those of you who do not know; RWG has a secure setup to protect it's members. We are hosted on a ridiculos expensive offshore server + we also have a reverse proxy server to hide our real location. Not gonna go into more details here, but try doing a search for offshore hosting. If you know anything about hosting, you will know that you can get a decent dedicated server from $100++. Offshore hosting does have it's own life and providing servers and bandwith is expensive and we are paying a high premium for this. Our monthly bills for everything has passed €1000 because of all the bandwidth we are using. Because of this and what I wrote above, we are €789 (about $1200) short this month. Now, as several members have said before, there are many, many members who contribute with valuable content here and we truly do not except that you should pay to upgrade. You should be rewarded for this and we will look into if this can be done. The problem is that the members who contribut with content very often are dedicated members who often feel that they use the forum so often they upgrade or they upgrade because they feel it is worth it or they like it here. We all have our own reasons for upgrading or not. So what should we do? Ideally, we whould have 300 members who paid $5 (that's dollars, not Euro, as we currently use) If more members were willing to pay, the price would be even lower. So should we just use monthly payments? I dunno. There are of course a couple of things to concider; Will we have the same amount of members who are willing to upgrade when they will have to pay $5 a month and not can just pay a lower, yearly price? You tell me. The dilemma for us in the last year has been the low dollar. Since we are paying for all of our services in Euro, we had to change our memberships from $ to € last year. And I have no problem understanding that €5 ($7. might be expensive. So that's why I am suggesting $5 as a monthly price again, as this might seem a bit more fair. But then we need more supporters.... If we then keep the yearly and discounted memberships (these would be $30 a year/$2.5 pr month) we would need an even higher of supporting members. But maybe this is just what will bring more supporters to the forum; a lower price? Or maybe we should try the model of other forum; find a regular dedicated server somewhere in the world and cross our fingers that it will not be confisacted or monitored by some federal agency? This would for sure bring down our bills drastically. Another solution is to downgrade to a cheaper server. That would make the forum run slower and would not make it very enjoyable to spend time here, but that would also lower our bills. So is there a point in all of this. Maybe. Even though it is highly appreciated, I think it is very unfair that we have a forum with the number of members we have and a very small percentage pay the bills. As I have said before, I do not expect every member who spend a lot of time here to contribute, since many of them provide extremely valuable content, but at the very least there should be enough members that contribute so that our bills are paid. Even fewer people pay the bills when I post these posts, because we usually get some very generous donators who contact me fairly quickly when the board is in trouble. Since all members use of our resources, I don't think that's fair. But that's just me. Maybe I'm wrong and should not think like this? To finish this off, please visit this site; http://www.seochamps.net/forum. You can use your excisting username(e-mail) and passord to log on and create a user account there. Admin Apologies for the terrible spelling. Missed a nail with a hammer and, well...you get the picture My fingers are not as accurate as they should be.

Topics merged

Unfortunately, that is not an option, as things are today. We got three paypal-accounts closed last year because PP for some reason doesnt alow this kind of site to receive payments through their system. If we were able to publicly accept PP, it would be easu to just add a box where people could type in the amound and click a donate button. Unfortunately, the credit card system we use today, doesn't allow this. But as I have mentioned before; Feel free to contact me for alternative ways of paying. This also includes donations.

Apparently, you are using an ad-blocker, so you don't see the ad itself.

Kenberg hit the nail on the head with his explanation

I'm sorry, but when have I said that? The ads generate about $2 a day and personally I don't concider that a lot. And yes, it is unfortunate that replica websites are allowed to advertise through Google. I try the best I can to add them to the google ad filter, so that they do not show. Unfortunately there are a lot of them and when I add 10, 10 more show up.... Just gonna add a couple of more thing right now, as I'm off to bed. (I'll post more tomorrow) Long time members can always contact me for alternative payment methods The credit card payments are recurring. If you prefer to stop the recurring payment, just contact me with your payment ID or e-mail you used when you paid and I will stop it. If you forget this and get charged, just contact me, again with payment ID or e-mail used, and I will immediately refund your payment, if you wish.

Admin privileges Besides, I did add it to the stock smilies; :drool:

Just finished updating the board with some new features; - Board is once again ad free for supporting members. Ads will be visible on top, bottom and on the bottom of every topic for regular members. Had forgotten about this, until I read the thread about supporting members, etc.: http://www.rwg.cc/members/index.php?showtopic=74406 (I'll add my comments to that thread later on) - Simple PM search function added. You can now easily find all PM's from a member. Just click the magnification glass next to their name in your inbox; - Bump feature repaired (this was acutally done a while back): For those who doesn't know what this is, take a look here: http://www.rwg.cc/members/index.php?autoco...ticle&id=86 - Minor security updates - Optimized the search engine further

@porsche356a Your account has been upgraded by TT, but I still need your payment details. As it says on the payment page; I can not go ahead and upgrade members without this info, as I need to know who paid what so to any member who upgrade, please forward payment ID and user nameadmin@rwg.cc or PM me with it after you have made the payment.