Donations

It's worth re-capping where the May Donation Drive left us.

Basically, we covered the debt, we paid for May, we raised enough for June and a week into July (with the affiliates factored in)... but we didn't put ourselves significantly ahead.

Importantly we did increase the number of monthly subscriptions, and that should mean that in the next 10 days we should we should see the effect of that and then I reckon it should cover July too. So we are safe, we are back into being cool again, and mostly this is because of renewed monthly subscriptions.

I want to say a big thank you to the people who made large donations. Most of the catchup was made by those donations.

I also looked at eBay, and it's true that in September they changed the calculations and that hit us badly. The major impact is that people make impulse Buy-It-Now purchases of lower priced things, but take time for the higher priced things. The result is that we are only earning commissions from the lowest priced items. In May, 1 bike got purchased in the 24 hour window that we would get paid for, and that amounted to a quarter of the money we earned from eBay. So the changes eBay made in September appear to be permanent, and have removed the lion's share of our income. Bummer.

If you need to ramp up donations then I have two options you may wish to use -

A simple bit of code that recognises drunken posting, either in relation to a median 'norm' or in relation to that individual's usual posting style.
When a member comes on here drunk and posts anything recognised as inflammatory gibberish they are charged a nominal fee of 50p per word.
There would need to be a couple of exceptions for those who are unable of posting in a sober manner regardless of their level of intoxication, but those members could be just charged a flat rate fee of say £80 per month, for being idiots.

Charge for the ignore function - £5 per use.

When a member comes on here drunk and posts anything recognised as inflammatory gibberish they are charged a nominal fee of 50p per word.

It's the fucking Scoble Tax!

burn the heretic

can't we just charge forrins for using the forum, we could call it the pole tax.

can't we just charge tall people for using the forum, we could call it the bean pole tax.

ftfy

I upped my donation a few weeks ago and cancelled the original with Paypal but my CP is showing two donations. Is there a way to remove the old one that I've missed?

Nope, the system either catches up in time or I kick it.

Are they both still valid? If so, let me know if anything is amiss when the first to expire does so.

Cheers. Could you kick it and get rid of the "1 beer every 6 months" when you have some spare time please.

Done

Cheers.

:)

just put a ten spot donation in. it was on behalf of Rich G who won a bet with me in the football thread but asked that i just drop the winnings to the forum. don't want any undue gold star credit coming my was as its absence is the thing that prompts me to do what all regular members should be doing

whats that?

so might have missed it but donations/gold star/super privileges exist?

Or did my donation just run out (at around the same time you switched over)...

The associated privileges still exist, but no gold stars for the time being.

There's going to be a temporary gap between the old way of doing things and the new way of doing things... but during that gap the funds that come in will help me bridge the gap until Microcosm has raised it's next round and I'm able to be paid a living salary.

The donations page linked on page 1 of this didn't carry across? Mine expired just before the move and was going to let the dust settle a bit before making the next one. @Velocio

My donation expired, would like a new link please.

paypal@lfgss.com

It's not much of a link I know... but donations are less important than fixing bugs and improving things right now.

Can I set up a recurring payment with just the email address?

I have added a donate button to the navigation, it allows you to setup recurring donations.

I should note that the move to Microcosm wiped out the biggest cost: hosting fees.

But we do still have costs:

• Domain names (including some legacy ones)
  
• SSL certs (for legacy redirects)
  
• CloudFlare CDN (Pro account to enable SSL on LFGSS)
  
• Some accountancy fees and other small costs
  
  

Most people cancelled their subscriptions, or perhaps PayPal does that automatically? Either way, the donation drive earlier this year wiped out the deficit, restored us to a little ahead, and with the cancellation of most subscriptions that is being depleted back down to zero.

I'm not yet sure of the total costs needed now, as it's not been a month and most of the remaining costs are annual and harder to get a full picture of. It's a few hundred per month, not circa a grand per month as it used to be.

The raw costs of £700 per month for physical hosting is now gone, Microcosm shoulders that cost but the tech is better so it runs the site at a far lower cost.

The affiliates have now gone to Microcosm, so the hosting fees are 100% covered by Microcosm in return for the affiliates. Yes, using affiliates still helps.

Which means the remaining ad-hoc costs are met 100% by donations.

We don't need much, but we do still need a little.

Donate button is in the nav bar under LFGSS.

There are donor privileges. You need to PM me after you have made a donation. Any donation that is worth over £25 gets the privileges, which means a one-off donation of size, or a recurring donation of small size. Privileges won't expire, hence me raising the bar at which they're earned.

Excellent. I had to cancel my recurring donation due to Paypal-based fuckery (they wouldn't remove a bank account I wanted them to remove because "OMG YOU HAVE PAYMENTS OUTSTANDING" and they wouldn't let me just switch accounts), and then you did the switch to Microcosm about two days afterwards so I couldn't easily renew afterwards. This resolves that little pickle.

Donated. Keep tweaking - I am appreciating the changes!

It's been too long - just donated after a long time on the breadline - more to come - ta for the best place for cyclists off a bike.

I've added a donation button to the home page.

Since Microcosm failed, I've been focusing on other things and not worried about donations. There was a surge last year which put us a little ahead and that saw things through.

However in the last 8 months donations have reduced every month and affiliate revenue has been almost wiped out.

The drop in donations is probably due to multiple reasons:

• Debit cards expiring
  
• People forgetting that they donate, seeing it happen and cancelling
  
• Fewer people choosing to donate (no replacing those that stop donating)
  
• Less visibility of donor status
  
• Removal of donor perks (unless people ask, only 1 or 2 donors have)
  
  

The drop in affiliates is due to several reasons:

• Change in terms with providers like eBay
  
• Change in % with providers like Amazon, Wiggle, etc
  
• Adblockers (the rise of uBlock) more aggressively blocking affiliate cookies (sales aren't attributed to us when they do happen)
  
• Less guest traffic from Google, in part because fewer pages are indexed by Google (no sitemap.xml file)
  
  

Together this has led to income dropping to a couple of hundred per month, sometimes a few hundred.

Which again... is OK.

Microcosm has actually been our saviour in many ways, the key one being that it has reduced costs from £1k per month down to only £350-£500 per month (range varies according to exact traffic served and currency exchange rates).

The reason I added the donate button to the home page is that the donations are on a downward decline and already take revenue below costs. Like many cycling sites I was hoping for uplift when fair weather kicked in, but that hasn't really happened. So I've again been helping LFGSS a little each month, but this time I want to call it before I get 6 months into doing this and rack up some credit card.

One-off donations above £20 are appreciated, but regular donations from a larger number of people for only £3-5 per month are preferred. Regular smaller donations help make income more predictable, and reduce the risk of us relying on a few individuals to cover the costs.

I am working on the code again, and have a ToDo list that includes Google sitemaps to try and help affiliate revenue recover (less reliance on donations), as well as donor perks and donor status being added again. But those things take time, I still have a lot of code to clean up so I can change things faster.

Adblockers (the rise of uBlock) more aggressively blocking affiliate cookies (sales aren't attributed to us when they do happen)

Does this also apply to AdBlockPlus?

If so, will selecting the "disable on LFGSS.com" option solve the problem?