Ben

Thanks for the comments so far. Hopefully we can have some discussion around this for a few weeks then I can put something in place. At the moment I'm thinking a combination of: a couple of banner ads that are removed if you become a premium member (including one advertising premium membership). Premium members get a few benefits and access to giveaways/upgrades and an off topic area but actual 'content' is always free. Premium membership can be an ongoing subscription or a one off donation for a set time period. I'm pleased there is a positive reaction to this. thanks for your support.

Hi TGA. UPDATE FOR 2020 FURTHER DOWN THREAD LINK - Back in feb (see below for original post) I gave a shout out for help to this amazing community which ultimately resulted in me being told the many varied and wonderful ways that you would all like to support the site. The gist of this is that the site is getting very expensive to run (I’ve paid out over £3000 in the last 12 months) and as the community grows the costs are ever increasing. I previously wrote about this in detail so I won’t go into it all again, but the response was just amazing! Its taken me another 6+ months to get around to it, but over the next few weeks I will be introducing a 3 ways that will help cover the running costs of TGA. I’ll talk here about how we will be doing this, and why I have chosen each of them. Advertising. After thinking about this long and hard, I have decided that I WILL be including display ads on the site. I was initially very much against doing this as the last thing I want is for the site to look like many other places online where you get bombarded with Ads. However, if done right I think it can work very well. I will be finding advertisers that are relevant to our community and working with them to help their business, which in-turn will better the community. It will also be a way for to support the site without forcing anyone to pay. The amount of ads will be tiered. Guests will get lots, Registered members less. There will also be an option to ‘turn ads off’ by joining one of the premium membership groups, which leads me nicely onto the next bit… Premium Membership. Available right away is just a single membership group. I hope to expand this in future to offer higher and lower options for those that would like to give more and receive move value in return, and also for those who would like to support the site but are limited in what they can afford (or are willing) to pay. That is a further cost to get implemented so fo now we have a single membership group. TGA Members - £5 per month Fuzzy Feeling – a warm and comforting glow from knowing that you are actively contributing to TGA’s success Less Adverts - We reduce the adverts to members around TGA Unlimited Likes - Unrestricted amount of likes available per day (MOST REQUESTED FEATURE!) Club Badge – special forum badge to show you’re a proud supporter in your posts/profile Sign up here - https://www.tga.community/subscriptions/ Donations Donations are a simple and fuss free way of contributing. A one off payment, of any amount you like, however often you like. Donate here - https://www.tga.community/clients/donations/ ==================== ORIGINAL POST BELOW ++++++++++++++++++++ In April I will have been running the The Grand Alliance Community forums for 2 years and in this time we have gone from a small group of users to an ever expanding membership that is currently flying towards 10000 total members. As I type this we have 80 members logged in and browsing and another 100+ guests. Age of Sigmar communities from all over the worlds are using the site and contacting me with exciting news from their local areas all the time (AoS Maters evening in the Philippines is the latest!!!) Because we are all nerds and love stats, here are a few highlights and some stats from google. The Leaderboard - http://www.tga.community/topmembers/ Biggest Thread - So the crux of all this is that its getting expensive to run. 2 years ago I started the website on a £30 monthly cloud hosting plan that included the cost of the software. I did all the work myself and hired in some help here and there where i needed to. During this time we have had some problems crop up here and there. Image hosting became an issue. The sheer number of photos that people were sharing exceeded the bandwidth that the cloud hosting offered so I had to set up Amazon hosting for the images, long term members might remember the loss of images but this has been resolved for quite some time now. The next major obstacle was email. I set up a gmail account to handle all email that the forums send. This includes notifications and registrations. after a while i started getting emails from people who were unable to register. I traced this down to the fact that free accounts only allow so much email per day before placing a block so a proper transactional email service was brought in. Mail chimp and Mandrill. This is now costing as much as the actual forum software to maintain. Where we are at now is monthly running costs of over $200, rising up every few months as the number of active uses on the site increase. Costs at the moments are (all in USD): Forum software and hosting. Currently $130 USD Email service $63 for the plan and first 25000 emails. Further top ups of $18 per 25000 emails. most months this is 1 top up, but last months it was 2. Amazon AWS S3 Hosting this varies on the amount of up and downloads but is usually $15-20 Total is somewhere between $225- $250 per month and varies a little month to month with the trend being a 25% increase each 1/4. If the rate stays the same as it has for the last 2 years in 12 months time it will be entirely unmanageable without help. What I am looking for is suggestion and ideas from the community of covering these costs. There are a few obvious options 1. Advertising. I could easily load up the site with adverts and end up looking like Bell of Lost souls. There is a reason the site has had not ads from the start, and probably that same reason why its become so popular, no-one really wants this, it does however pay the bills. This would like like selling banner adverts to anyone interested, and also promoting affiliate links. This would also be quite labour intensive of chasing advertisers and making sales. 2. Members section. I could open a premium membership level. It would have a monthly subscription. £2 per month. 100 members would see all the bills paid. thats 0.01% of registers users signing up. What you would get is the features that the forum has available already but i don’t have the time/skills to put in place. I can spend time/money to get it set-up and it would be paid for by the first month or 2 of subscriptions, after that the bills will be covered each month. More likes, better reputation system. better titles/profile system. Members only ‘off topic’ chat area. Groups and clubs system. Most of the things that regularly get requested. Importantly this would be ‘bonus’ stuff. Not things that are essential to enjoying the community. 3. Patreon system. 4. A kickstarter 5. a mixture of all of the above. 6. any other suggestions? So I am totally open to suggestions and ideas and would prefer the community to decide the best way to approach this.