Donations

We need to sort out dates for Tarck 3: South of the river and HH4: Lost in SE24... Will speak to the head Cattermole (or get JC to give his dad a kick in the ribs after Sunday lunch)...

VB - if we browse logged out does the forum get more $?

It would contribute to ad revenue, indeed.

Might get more for clicking through on the ads though.. and it'd be bugger all if 60something% of traffic already comes from external users.

Actually... don't do that.

Google are very sensitive to people rigging their revenue by encouraging people to click things. And whilst the revenue is important to us, we would really be up the creek for a while and things would be tougher if we didn't have it.

Simply: If you click adverts thinking it will help, Google will likely prove you wrong by penalising the whole site and shutting down our account.

I've seen them do this on many occasions, so please don't purposefully click adverts... it's not a good idea.

Surely they can only tell if you set up automated ad clickers? Like those peeps that used scripts to repeatedly click their banner ads? If it was just one IP clicking now and then (apart from not generating much cash) it would be unnoticed yes?

Any small range of IPs that persistently came up would be pretty obvious I'd guess. With 200,000 unique IP addresses every month a handful generating most adverts would stick out like a sore thumb.

And it's not hard to write the detection logic behind this, when I made the detection system for all of Premium TV's football websites it took less than a day to work out how to flag up accounts which had their usernames and passwords shared on forums, based on the distribution of IP addresses.

If I can do that in a day with little significant financial incentive, then Google can do a much better when their entire business model is based on adverts.

So yeah... it's not worth it. A small revenue is better than no revenue, so no-one should be clicking adverts thinking they're helping out... either click an advert because it's something you're interested in, or don't... anything else is likely to hurt us.

I didn't imagine fred sitting there clicking through on loads of stuff.. just now and then. But fair enough. I'm not logging out for no one anywayz! :)

With 150 posts to go, you can't afford to log out. Good luck this afternoon. I am sure you can get there by the New year.

Actually, there's no prize so I kinda can afford to log out. You lot should buy the server a beer for not blowing up under the weight (teehee) of my posting onslaught ;)

How about PPP (Pay per post) ?
Send hippy an invoice for £198.80.

ha!

How about PPP (Pay per post) ?
Send hippy an invoice for £198.80.

My bill for posting my legendary advice and witty banter would be far higher.

Hippy - 4.5% of all the posts on this forum were made by you.
Lets take a moment to ponder that...
.
.
.
Apparently there are many people who read this forum - hence that is a lot of influence.
I must assume your pro-midget anti-campagnolo agenda is getting noticed and wish to align myself with you.

Hi Fivage, Mr Rad! You've just joined the party

Hippy - 4.5% of all the posts on this forum were made by you.
Lets take a moment to ponder that...
.

Let's not. Hippy doesn't have time for pondering; he must keep posting.

Lets get pijany to celebrate.
(see how aligned I can be?)

4.5% of the internet is hippy.

So why does no-one read your blog?
The last comment was in November and that was RPM being sympathetic.

It's a cover. I'm mostly kept busy hand-typing all google results..

Still trying to get that Headset Press ?

are yuo sure you posting in the right thread

As of yesterday I implemented a CDN (content distribution network).

That's explained here: http://www.londonfgss.com/thread4490-11.html#post578977

Basically the site has got insanely busy, and now the fair weather is here it can only get busier.

For part of the day (from around 10am through to midnight) we're facing a need to get a second server to offload the database stuff onto, or to load balance this one... either option isn't cheap, both require a second server.

So instead of that I'm attempting to reduce the load on the one server we have by offloading all of the static files to a third party. I'd rather have this one server concentrate on making the pages and making things zippy for you guys.

However, this all costs.

The cost of the CDN is either:

Option 1

$4.99 per GB per month storage
$0.089 per GB per month transferred
$0.01 per 10,000 requests

Option 2

$249 per GB storage, forever
$0.039 per GB per month transferred

The first option looks better from the perspective of low cost start... but the numbers come out like this:

Storage: 968MB
Transferred (last 24 hours): 8GB
Requests per hour: 50,000 (1.2m per day)

So each month each option costs this:

Option 1

Storage: $4.99
Transfer: (8 * 30.41) * $0.089 = $21.65
Requests: ((5 * $0.01) * 24) * 30.41 = $36.49

Total = $63.13 per month

Option 2

Storage one-off: $249
Transfer: (8 * 30.41) * $0.039 = $9.49
Requests: FREE!

Total = $9.49 per month

You can see which one I want to be using. Less than $10 a month to offload a significant chunk of the traffic to the server is just a no-brainer.

The only problem with this is that there is a one-off fee of $249 per GB of storage.

The $249 would have paid for itself within 5 months, being cheaper than Option 1 and much cheaper than the continuing cost of a second server (the lowest realistic option there is around £80 per month).

Why this is a problem when it's obviously the right thing to do, is that I don't happen to have $249 lying around.

It's basically £180 at the current exchange rate, and whilst there is some money left in PayPal if I use that then I only have enough money left in PayPal for next month's server fees.

So yeah... we're broke. Isn't everyone and everything? Well, yes.

So what I'm asking is that IF you can help to the tune of £5 or £10 that you do. And if you can only help to the tune of £2, that you do. And if you're loaded and think nothing of dropping a £1k, then we don't need that much so just £180 would be lovely thank you.

The donate button is in the top right hand corner :)

Oh, and it's our 2nd birthday next week. And honestly, I can't think of a better dilemma to have than to be worrying about how to handle the growth of the site. Happy Birthday to us.

Oh, and if someone wants to donate a version of the donate button that flashes and grabs people's attention... ;)

Worth every penny!

Consider yourself donated to.

Thank you :)

I enabled some public stats btw:
http://www.quantcast.com/londonfgss.com

They're taking a while to populate. But what they indicate is that each month we have an audience of almost 48,000 people and are serving 2.5 million pages per month.

The rule of 10%'s is proving true yet again... basically the rule states that on a website 10% of people who visit the site are registered on the site, and 10% of that number participate. It's pretty much true here, the front page shows the 4,900+ people who are considered active and that's uncannily close to the 10% number. Almost 500 people post each day, which again is pretty much spot on.

if only we could find a way of stopping hippy posting we wouldn't need quite so many GIGA BYTES !

STOP IT HIPPY your ruining the site with your informative useful posts