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London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
dancing james
Velocio
Donations...
I'm afraid that I have to bang the drum on these again.
It wasn't an issue that the affiliates had declined because donations were stable enough and a few people had made larger, one-off donations this year and that made up for it and for a few months we seemed to be getting ahead of ourselves.
But... #brexit.
Every bill that LFGSS has is in USD, and it's clear looking at the charges appearing today for the hosting and email, that the exchange rate difference is not minor.
We've gone from "around break-even each month on average (some months up, some months down)" to "Oops, exchange rates mean we're going to be about £70 down this month and likely each month from now".
What this means is that the small spikes (like last month) that see us through the small dips (a few months ago) on average they even out... but they're not enough to make up the £70 down I now expect each month... the ups aren't up enough, and the dips are usually large.
Instead of one-off donations (even if large), it's much safer to use smaller more frequent donations from many people. This also spreads the burden to an insignificant amount... it's just "buy the forum a beer once a month"... or a cheap bottle of wine if that's your thing.
A fair few people who think that they are donating actually aren't... a lot of donations have expired over the past year or so.
If you get value out of the forum, consider setting up a £5 monthly donation.
It's easy to donate.
To set up a recurring monthly donation (recommended):
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=JVANL7DPKDK8U
To make a one-off donation (appreciated, but a smaller monthly one is better):
https://paypal.me/lfgss/10
If I can rebuild the regular and small donations, this will smooth out the finances and will protect against the currency exchange rates.
I also do have to build a mini war-chest, unfortunately the site is too busy... we're on the cusp of not being able to get some things for free (like the maps on the event pages). It looks like we have about 3-6 months before some of our costs rise as a result (depends on whether the Summer traffic levels are maintained after the Summer, or whether they decline a little).