What would you do if the forum had a subscription fee (to post classifieds, etc)?

while it can't be nice for anyone to so selflessly have to use their own money to enable our own self-centred spoutings, it's equally unpalatable that that person should profit from our spoutings.

Where I find this line of thought to be flawed:

1) The internet is free as in speech, but not free as in beer. Someone somewhere paid money for the material cost of making it all function, from servers, to software, to connections and bandwidth.

2) All of the intermediaries DO make money to the point of being able to pay wages... the hosting company, the telecommunication company, the makers of the various bits of software... in fact the only entity in the entire chain that doesn't receive a wage from the collective effort that produced the site is... me. That is, the person who brought all of these parts together and recognised a need in myself and the cycling community, who then invested the time and money and continues to do so, is also the person who has never earned a penny from the site.

3) Others on here DO make money because of the site. Numerous traders and individuals have done considerable business and made a decent amount of money from the site.

4) You recognise material costs, but not resource costs. Costs break down into those buckets, things and people. You're willing to accept that things cost, but somehow feel that people shouldn't. Yet the going rate on the open market for the skillset to run the site as I do starts at £50 per hour, that's the lower end.

And now, when I consider and open a consultation on the need to insulate the site from haphazard funding, extreme peaks and troughs, by creating a revenue stream that can even it all out... all the time with personal profit NOT being the motive I get to face unrealistic bullshit.

I fundamentally think that I do actually have the right to be able to draw a wage from something I create if that which I have created has an inherent value, especially when others and not I are indeed earning money because of it.

I may not be wanting to (doing just fine and not starving, thanks), but the right surely exists?

The view in opposition is more likely to make me want to make money than anything else. I really dislike having what I feel to be my rights denied by others, and I'm not the kind of person who will just accept being told that a right has vanished.

I've read hundreds of responses and am teetering towards NOT implementing a subscription model. However, if another motherfucker just dare try and present a serious argument to the view that I don't have a right to earn even a trivially small token amount from the forum... then really, you'll have guaranteed that I do.

I don't have any intention to cash in or sell out, but just fucking try and tell me that with the time, effort, skill and devotion that I've put in, that I don't have the right to. Just fucking try. You're so wrong.