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@Velocio
Yeah I'd have to do tax returns for it. Keep it above board, and there's probably extra stuff I haven't thought about (like having to have a registered company for it or something daft).
But if the burden of doing tax stuff is the downside to having a revenue model that funds the servers and prevents me from desperately running around cap in hand every now and then (which I do hate doing) then I think it's worth it.
Software can track everything, and I'm scarily good at software.
What else? No-one was really getting a free ride off of me. I do subsidise the difference between income and outgoings, but the google adverts for guests have pretty much saved our arse by providing a steady £60 > £70 per month, and the T-Shirts last year paid for months and months of time, and on top of that there have been donations and fund-raisers.
So I haven't been the sole person paying, the community has more than stepped up and has in fact carried the weight of the monthly hosting costs. But I seldom included in the costs things like domains, software, support (optimisation help), etc... because I didn't want to unfairly burden the finances and it tended to be a little here and there. My concern for the future is simply the extra server costs doesn't translate to an increase in revenue each month, and whereas before the monthly negative would be absorbed by the fund raising and merchandising, it's harder to do that when the costs are higher.
The proposal is good because it does a few things:
1) It reduces the risk to the income by spreading it thinly over a great many people... a few people leaving or not donating wouldn't hurt.
2) It more fairly spreads the burden by making each person pay a little rather than a few people keep donating the most... though perhaps this could be seen as unfair as we don't know what this means in terms of proportion of disposable income, but then... we're only talking the price of a beer each year.
3) It helps solve the classifieds problem by creating a low artificial barrier for spam, and by helping the forum be funded by those who profit from it.