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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.
hoarderofgoodies
Background
LFGSS is huge, it's one of the largest cycling websites on the internet. We serve over 240,000 users per month, and over 1 million visits/sessions by those users. In total, we serve in excess of 1 million web pages per week, send 50,000 emails per month (notifications of new comments, replies) and push more than 1TB of web traffic per month. LFGSS is huge.
LFGSS is also influential, being key to many people involved in cycling, bring people together, changing lives, and campaigning for better cycle infrastructure and investment.
LFGSS is also fun, enabling people to do things they never would, inspiring them, or just giving giggles on grey days.
All of this is done for free, for no profit.
The costs
It costs over
£530(£690 as of October 2016 due to massive change in USD currency exchange rates and the addition of a new authentication system) per month to run LFGSS. For what is achieved with this money, the size and popularity of the site, this is extraordinarily cheap. But due to currency exchange rates and the sheer size of the forum, the costs to run LFGSS are rising.How LFGSS is funded
Most of our costs are covered by donations, approximately 2/3 of all costs are covered by people like you who find value in the forum and choose to give a little money to help the forum survive.
The other 1/3 of our money comes from affiliates. These are shops and services whom are talked about in comments, and when someone visits a site like Chain Reaction Cycles and buys something as a consequence of clicking a link on LFGSS, then in some cases Chain Reaction Cycles will give LFGSS 1-3% of the revenue. Affiliate revenue used to be better, and used to pay for nearly all of the forum (even when it was more expensive to run), but it is increasingly unpredictable and cannot be relied upon month to month. Some months are good, some are terrible.
Donations
The very best way to fund LFGSS is through donations.
Not one-off large donations by a few people, but by a very large number of people giving a little. Revenue needs to be predictable and stable month-to-month, so a regular small monthly donation is far better in the long-term than a one-off larger donation. It gives peace of mind.
A lot of people make money off of the classifieds, a lot of people find a lot of joy in the forum. If you find value in the forum, consider giving back.
How to donate
The recommended way is to use PayPal to create a recurring donation:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=9ZKHFRC7LGD3L
Be sure to click the checkbox to make it a recurring monthly donation.
Otherwise it is trivial to make a one-off donation:
https://paypal.me/lfgss/10
If you have trouble with that and want to do a one-off donation, then the PayPal email is: paypal@lfgss.com .
If 200 people are giving a small amount every month, and we can get to the point that we can fully cover costs just from regular donations, then this will provide a lot of stability for the site.
If that happens, we can use the less predictable affiliate revenue to fund events, support for people participating in events, and just use that money to do extra things to support cycling.
The key message remains the same:
You don't have to donate, the forum is free to use. But if you can afford to, and value the forum accordingly, regular donations are the best way to help support it long-term.
Thanks
David Kitchen
Owner/founder/admin of LFGSS.
Managing a recurring donation
If you have opted to donate on a regular basis (a subscription) then you can manage this via PayPal on their My pre-approved payments page. Once you visit that page, filter the list to show just the "Active" subscriptions.
Note that there should only be one active subscription for LFGSS at most, but I have found out that PayPal enabled it such that you could set up more than one, if this has occurred please do cancel the ones that you consider the duplicate and get in touch for refunds if you would like that. I will refund duplicates for as long as I have complete records in PayPal.