Forum running costs

General discussion about learning languages

If financial support is needed for the forum...

Poll ended at Thu Oct 26, 2017 2:18 pm

I would prefer to make an occasional donation such as a one-off gift or for specific projects
47
64%
I would happily make a small regular donation
19
26%
I wouldn't/couldn't make a contribution in the foreseeable future
6
8%
I would not want to donate full stop
2
3%
 
Total votes: 74

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Carmody
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Re: Forum running costs

Postby Carmody » Fri Oct 20, 2017 3:18 pm

Ah yes, the old
eaten by a giraffe
concern.... ;)

As usual, emk has thought of everything; and I am not surprised.

Many thanks as always to emk, and all mods and all admins. :D
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Bluepaint
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Re: Forum running costs

Postby Bluepaint » Fri Oct 20, 2017 4:06 pm

Carmody wrote:Ah yes, the old
eaten by a giraffe
concern.... ;)

As usual, emk has thought of everything; and I am not surprised.

Many thanks as always to emk, and all mods and all admins. :D


Emk is right there is no single point of failure with this forum. There are a few people with admin access, not all of them publicly acknowledged (so if for example there is a malicious attack on Rdearman & he has an access problem someone else can still get in to admin stuff to sort it). We've also multiple lines of communication between us.
However, for improvements and technical issues we are very heavily reliant on two particular people. Having funds to better the server and occasionally hire contractors is another way to fortify ourselves against IT issues.
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Jar-Ptitsa
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Re: Forum running costs

Postby Jar-Ptitsa » Sat Oct 21, 2017 2:04 am

emk wrote: if one of us admins is eaten by a giraffe,


oh no, watch out!!!!

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Arnaud
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Re: Forum running costs

Postby Arnaud » Sat Oct 21, 2017 6:36 am

More than one minute to display the infamous "504 Gateway Time-out nginx/1.13.5" message, this morning.
Take my money, and quick :mrgreen:
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emk
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Re: Forum running costs

Postby emk » Sat Oct 21, 2017 3:08 pm

Arnaud wrote:More than one minute to display the infamous "504 Gateway Time-out nginx/1.13.5" message, this morning.
Take my money, and quick :mrgreen:

OK, I've shut down Yandex's ridiculous crawlers, and I've asked Google to crawl slower, too. I'm going to also shut down the following "marketing research" crawlers:

Code: Select all

# These are marketing crawlers and other useless junk.
User-agent: AhrefsBot
User-agent: DotBot
User-agent: SemrushBot
User-agent: MJ12bot
Disallow: /

But the bad news is that this probably won't be enough. We actually have a surprisingly large amount of user traffic, too, though I haven't finished analyzing all the details. Here's an overview, with Yandex mostly gone:

Code: Select all

> 7 - Browsers                                                         Total: 366/367

 Hits       h% Vis.     v%   Bandwidth Data
 ------ ------ ---- ------ ----------- ----
 145669 30.38% 4114 28.04%    1.63 GiB Chrome   ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 115550 24.10% 3387 23.09%  575.75 MiB Crawlers |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 109231 22.78% 2555 17.42%    1.08 GiB Firefox  |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 61756  12.88% 1980 13.50%  432.11 MiB Safari   ||||||||||||||||
 18849   3.93%  613  4.18%  302.45 MiB Opera    |||||
 17687   3.69% 1146  7.81%  174.03 MiB MSIE     ||||
 8664    1.81%  755  5.15%  136.76 MiB Others   ||

Since crawlers are now only a small portion of our traffic, I've upgraded from a t2.micro to a t2.small, which probably gets us up around $40/month or $45/month.

Unfortunately, getting the forum set up to take donations properly will also involve some real costs, both in time and money. I'm going to talk to the moderators this weekend about some stop-gap solutions. Mostly what I'd be looking for right away would be a few people who want to donate $2 or $5 per month, or something tiny like that—we have nothing against bigger one-time donations, but that leaves more money lying around and we have to manage it and account for it in more complicated ways.
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Teango
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Re: Forum running costs

Postby Teango » Sat Oct 21, 2017 7:51 pm

emk wrote:Mostly what I'd be looking for right away would be a few people who want to donate $2 or $5 per month...

I'd be happy to help out with a monthly donation, emk, just send me a PM and let me know how I can set this up.
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Stelle
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Re: Forum running costs

Postby Stelle » Sun Oct 22, 2017 3:47 pm

I would be happy to donate monthly, or to contribute larger amounts intermittently. I can't help at all on the technical side, but I would love to be able to contribute financially. I would also be happy to contribute in both my own name and in other users' names who don't have the disposable income at the moment.

I know that we haven't talk about this at all, but I definitely wouldn't support any kind of extra perks for people who pay. I love that this community is fully open and available to all.

Thanks to mods and admins for all that you do!
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Brun Ugle
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Re: Forum running costs

Postby Brun Ugle » Sun Oct 22, 2017 3:53 pm

$2-5 a month should be doable for me. I'm ready whenever you get the details sorted.

Regarding user traffic. If we just leave the site open on our browser while we're doing other things, is that adding to the traffic, or does it only count when we click on things? I have a tendency to leave the page open all the time. Sometimes I might have it on one tab and be using some other site on another tab, and other times I might leave this tab open while I'm using something else entirely, like Excel. I have no idea how these things work, but if it causes problems, I'll close the tab when not using this site.
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Elenia
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Re: Forum running costs

Postby Elenia » Sun Oct 22, 2017 4:27 pm

Stelle wrote:I know that we haven't talk about this at all, but I definitely wouldn't support any kind of extra perks for people who pay. I love that this community is fully open and available to all.


Likewise! I would want my contribution to be just to help out, not so I can have special features. I don't think I'd know what to do with special features, and I would want functions to be restricted for non-contributing members.

EDIT: I wouldn't want functions to be restricted!
Last edited by Elenia on Sun Oct 22, 2017 6:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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rdearman
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Re: Forum running costs

Postby rdearman » Sun Oct 22, 2017 4:41 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:$2-5 a month should be doable for me. I'm ready whenever you get the details sorted.

Regarding user traffic. If we just leave the site open on our browser while we're doing other things, is that adding to the traffic, or does it only count when we click on things? I have a tendency to leave the page open all the time. Sometimes I might have it on one tab and be using some other site on another tab, and other times I might leave this tab open while I'm using something else entirely, like Excel. I have no idea how these things work, but if it causes problems, I'll close the tab when not using this site.

There isn't any network traffic when the page is open on your browser unless you do something. For a lot of sites that isn't the case because they are throwing advertisements and other crap down the pipe at you. One of the things we're trying to accomplish here is to keep the site free of stupid ads. Advertisements are horrible for the site, the user and sometimes even contain malware!

Stelle wrote:I know that we haven't talk about this at all, but I definitely wouldn't support any kind of extra perks for people who pay. I love that this community is fully open and available to all.

Ditto! We all feel the same way. I can only speak for myself, but I think generally among the Mods & Admins is the feeling that we need to keep the site and the content free for people to use and contribute. This definitely isn't a money making scheme for any of us and generally it has been a time/money sink which we're all doing just to be part of, and maintain a community.

This site and the amazing content provided by you guys as members is the reason we're getting caned by the web-crawlers! We all provide great content, advice and links all free of charge at the point of use. Please remember that this site is useless without you all. It is your questions, answers and content that makes it a target for content hungry search engines.

I also want to say that if you're in a position where you're not able to contribute financially don't stress. If people aren't able to contribute financially it isn't really a problem because you all contribute with participation. I wouldn't like anyone to feel that they aren't valued members just because they aren't flush with cash.
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