That’s an interesting thought. I know I probably used it most over the winter into early spring last year as I researched grafting, dropped off in the summer as I was busy actually doing stuff, and I’m picking back up in the last 6 weeks or so. That being said, I think I’ve at least glanced at the site every day…
It would be interesting to see how different people use it. I’m sure the admins have some great charts to look at.
For the last year, April through June had the busiest activity for the forum. Winter months were the slowest with about 15K page views per day. April through June had anywhere from 25 to 30K views/day, excluding some really high peak days. The data includes non-members and crawlers, as well as logged in members.
All the other data pretty much matches the same curve. New member signups, new topics posted, new contributors, new posts, etc. No matter the metric, all show a peak around May.
I will post an update in a week or so. So far around $800 has come in via PayPal, no checks have showed up yet. Thanks to all the contributors thus far!
In the last drive we got around $2900. We might get a bit less this time since in the winter the site is less active. The main goal really is to get to $1650 which is enough to run the site for a year. Asking for money more than once a year gets a little annoying.
I guess this idea has probably been raised before, but I was wondering if you considered making a subscription for this forum? With the growing number of members, posts, photos etc. the cost for keeping the site can get much more than what is collected from donations. I would allow the cost of subscription to go up and down depending on the cost of running the site the previous year. The subscription would make every user pay his/her fair share, so that no one is unwillingly subsidizing others. If you go that way, I suggest making the first 3-6 months free, so that new users can appreciate the value of the site before deciding on subscription.
I’m not trying to speak for Scott, but as I’ve known him from lots of communication in staff topics, I’m thinking this would be the least favorite form of funding the forum. It would be my least favorite.
Personally, if funding ever became an issue, I’d rather see a bit of minimal unobtrusive advertising on the forum, but Scott has made it clear in the past that he wasn’t interested in that either, at least at that time.
Not trying to embarrass him, but I’ve not seen anyone yet who has had less interest in capitalizing on a popular internet forum, than Scott. It would certainly be his right to make some money on the time he has put into creating and maintaining this forum. I wouldn’t think less of him if he did, but so far he hasn’t wanted a single penny for creating/maintaining the forum.
For any who are curious, web crawlers are bots who access web pages for internet searches/indexing.
So for instance, someone types in growingfruit.org into a Google search, Google won’t just show the growingfruit.org website, but also a small list of categories and topics. My understanding is that list comes from Google’s web crawler, which accessed those growingfruit.org web pages itself.
I am not suggesting to make it for profit, although as said, Scott is entitled to it. My suggestion to make a subscription is just for covering expenses. With the large number of forum members, this subscription would be peanuts for the greatest majority of us.
[quote=“Kellogg_Hill_Farms, post:32, topic:32268”]
Every few months create a new user profile and get more months for free.
[/quote] There are ways to prevent that. Otherwise, a lot of news outlets and other for profit websites would go bankrupt. And in any case, those who would do that are probably going to be a small minority and are the ones who never donate in annual fund raising calls.
@scottfsmith Alternatively, I think you can announce a suggested donation amount so that every member knows how much is a reasonable/fair donation.
So far we have been raising more than enough money by this means. If we start to run short we could consider other models, but this one is the least work for me so I’m not planning on changing it as long as we are staying in the black.