T-F funding

[Yami]

I have no idea how much it costs to host and maintain T-F, but it must be a lot. It's probably been considered before, but how about a donation system for those of us who want to give back to the place that's been home to us? Or a paid membership system, where we can get a paid membership/subscription to T-F which gets us stuff like, allowed a bigger avatar/larger PM limit/different colour username/tf.net email acc (unlikely one that).

Just a thought - I've seen it work on other forums, but again I don't really know if T-F needs any funding or anything.

 

[james.wired]

Doesn't this forum make a tiny bit of money off of advertisements? Like when you are you guest you see lots of them.

 

[Yami]

I do know that, but I'm guessing that Google ads don't really make all that much money? (quite a wide guess admittedly)

 

[kmote]

We used to have an area for contributors, in fact I believe we only got rid of it recently.

 

[Trotter]

That's something to think about, Yami. We'll kick it around and see what happens.

 

[Baez]

With the amount of ads viewed by guests, this site does okay for itself .

But opening the contributions area again would be a good idea. If nothing else it could help kickstart our review section.

 

[Yami]

Review section?! Count me in

 

[office politics]

how about selling TF swag? slap a logo on a black tshirt or lanyards, usb drives, etc.

 

[Yami]

I'm up for a couple USB drives to give to friends, presuming they have the URL on them. And t-shirts, if they're actually decent quality (it's very difficult to get good t-shirts in the UK, I end up getting all mine from the US) and the logos don't wear off.

 

[james.wired]

I'd be up to pay like $5 a year for a part of the forum that can only be seen/accessed by other paying subscribers that allows much more free will then the rest of the forum. A MUCH less strict off topic sub-forum if you will (just ditch #2 completely)