LFGSS survives by donations

donation made.

Turns out @Aroogah is a nice bloke and has only asked for a forum donation in lieu of payment for an item he is sending me.

I matched his requested amount, as its a good cause.

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Thanks for keeping me entertained and letting me sell my crap - 10% of value coming your way.

Been on here nearly 8yrs, use the site daily, have been entertained by many, infuriated by a few, sold and bought stuff, gained valuable knowledge. Love being a part of this community. Set up a monthly donation today. Thank you @Velocio.

additional one-off donation made. thanks.

Set up a monthly donation after someone sent me something in exchange for a donation. 5k posts in I figure I should contribute again!

Donation 'fee' of 5% from some recent sales on Classifieds.

Had the same dealings, top bloke, £10 over to forum now.

Monthly donation set up again cheers @Velocio ❤️

Bumping to the front page because our costs have risen.

I mean... it's OK, not the end of the world... USB > GBP hasn't helped in the last 9 months, but the real issue is this:

• There is more traffic, we are busier
  
  

Does that change much? Not really, servers are fine... but it changes 1 thing, we were sending ~90k email notifications per month, and our $90 per month billing for SendGrid allows 100k emails per month... and we are now sending over 230k emails per month... so we've blown straight through our allowance (and did so last month too but I didn't notice) as you're all online chatting more. This has tripled that cost. We get charged $0.01 per additional email, are currently 130k over quota, hence additional $130 per month right no (we are on the Pro 100K plan here https://sendgrid.com/docs/ui/account-and-settings/billing/#api-plans-overage-costs )

It'll probably return to what it was after all this stuff, and it's not the end of the world now (I pay for things on credit card to soak up the fluctuations)... but if you've been having a good time on the site and don't donate and can afford £5 or £10 per month, please know such things are appreciated and do add up.

The donate link is under the LFGSS menu at the top of every page, and also here.

I guess people could change their settings? I choose not to get any emails, what’s the main reason for sending out emails?

I noticed that the 'Today' tab had shown a increase in the number of pages increasing from a low of 6-8 up to 13 last week.

what’s the main reason for sending out emails?

It's the only notification system we have, it's reliable, cheap compared to alternatives, and means people don't have to be constantly online to see when conversations they are following have been replied to when they wish to know and potentially reply soon.

I mean... it works, we have a 99% deliverability rate, an open rate over 105% (people open some emails more than once!?) and server logs show it drives the majority of engagement.

So it's valuable, just temporarily much higher than before as people are engaging quicker (more notifications) and I've seen that the number of followed conversations is increasing (more people engaging with more stuff).

I'm fine with the costs rising if it's a valuable thing... the engagement clearly says it is. But if it's long-term costs rising then I'll engineer the costs to be lower, and if it's short / medium term costs rising then we'll absorb them but hope for a few more donations to soak it up.

£10 in from me

Could there be a aggregation feature? I'd happily get 1 email every 6 hours with all the reply's I've been in (it might ... cool off some of the heated discussions that have happened recently). Appreciate that the time-cost to you for fixing/changing might be more than the current increase in outgoings

A digest option no more than once every n time is an option for engineering my way out of it if it is the new norm for the forum.

Would it be worth turning the default to 'no emails' and getting people to opt in instead? no idea if thats even possible of course but personally I get mildly annoyed by notifications from a new thread I follow until eventually I get round to unticking it.

You can change that for new items: https://www.lfgss.com/updates/settings/

Thanks for the nudge boss, I have sold a few things recently so here is £25.

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Thanks all... the increase in costs has been met for this month and a bit of the overage from last month, so I'll put this back in the General room and we can gladly ignore it again for a bit :)

Possibly do a mailshot? I don’t always notice when this thread becomes active

Append a little note at the end of every email that goes out. Convert a cost centre into a source of revenue.

Thanks for every thing !

Allister

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been doing a monthly donation for a while but rather than upping the amount i made some stickers - all proceeds to the forum

https://www.lfgss.com/comments/15319889/

a surprising £33 from sales so far!

Donated after a recent sale!
Now... can anyone explain (by pm) why I can’t see the Current Projects thread at the moment?

Sorted!! Thank you @Tijmen