Ahh.. reminds of the old time when paying over the net was still something I couldn't do.
Anyhow, maybe it would be possible as well for the forum to make some money with internet ads? A lot of websites offering free services are funding themselves with the small.. or higher *shrugs*... amounts made with it.
FWIW, as a member of several esteemed message boards and forums across the web, I rarely ever get distracted or annoyed by advertisements, and in fact, am known to click on them from time to time to keep revenue going.
The trick is to not allow any crazy, spasmodic, epilepsy-inducing flash ads, and to make sure that the ads themselves are not intrusive. Banner ads work well. From a forum member's perspective, I am all in favor of non-intrusive banner ads if they keep my favorite forums from going under.
Like I said, if ads get put up, and they don't insult me or advertise *at* me, I *will* click on them. I think others will probably agree with this. We don't want this to become a subscription-based forum, and we certainly don't want it to become unavailable.
A sick of it... yes. I agree, I guess I'm just unlucky, but I get "max user blah-blah" all the time in peak hours, by all the time I mean 5/10 times I try to open, refresh or send message, reply... Making me lose my wall of text or doing doubleposts...
Willing to contribute on forum (Well, not some BIG amount, but that thing isn't costing so much, and we have a LOT of peeps here), as I spend here more time than in game actually, and it's getting starting to be real pain in the a- erm - butt.
Any official word?
I buy things I don't want to make an impression on people I don't like.
I'd be willing to pitch in $5 a month. More once I have a job again. But please ,lets continue to avoid ads. They clog the screen, add to load time, and frankly I don't think they are needed here at all. Besides, I don't think we need ads to avoid going under. We're discussing improvement, not salvage.
Adding advertisement banners and/or images would be just senseless, because most of us are using ad-blockers, I suppose.
I would be also willing to donate some cash, maybe once per quarter or month, I don't know yet. What I can also imagine, that we get toghether some buffer for a dedicated server or even a root server. Linux itself provides us with good methods for blocking various attackers and it is a very powerful host system for almost all webservers, like Apache or Lighttpd. The database server configuration could be adjusted as well...