Carmody wrote:I'm going to cough up another $21/month (in addition to the $40/month it costs me)
I have said this on many occasions before but it remains a mystery to me why the financial burden of this magnificent forum has to rest on the shoulders of just one or two persons. Surely a financial arrangement can be set up so we can all contribute to the effort and so lighten the load of emk.
Perhaps I can explain. Basically when HTLAL went down for the bazillionant time I volunteered to host PHPBB on my server as an interim solution until HTLAL came back to life. Now this wasn't a real problem for me since I was already paying the hosting costs for another website of mine. There were a number of issues with the hosting company I was using at the time. One of the primary ones being the very poor MySQL database support and access. We kept having DB access issues. Eventually we got them resolved after about 6 months and everything was fine and I just continued to pay since I was already paying.
Then we got hacked. Or more accurately the hosting companies server got hacked and all the accounts on it were compromised. They injected some malware into the PHP codebase. So as an emergency measure EMK & I took down the old site, and he ran up a new server on this Amazon account. It is still running on his Amazon account. Like myself EMK wasn't all that bothered about paying for the hosting since like me, he was already paying for some Amazon hosting services and it wasn't a huge burden. However, over time the cost of the service has inched up as we've had to add more features (like the recent certification issue described here) and more database space taken, etc..
All of the moderators have discussed how to share the burden of costs, or give members the ability to pay, but the problem comes down to taxation. If you were to give me money, or EMK, to run the site then it is income. And income is taxable. In both the UK and the USA the burden of filing all the tax forms and associated bureaucratic crap made both of us loath to ask for donations.
We have discussed in the past the creation of a charitable organisation which would allow members to contribute donations, and wouldn't be a tax burden on a single individual. This course of action is
being actively pursued by the moderation team and we hope in the not too distant future we'll be an established charitable organisation to promote the use and learning of languages. There are obviously a huge number of forms, applications and bureaucratic loops to jump through before the government will recognise a charity that can take money and operate as an independent body. It also means that unlike HTLAL the community would never be dependant on a single individual or account and that it will have a board of trustees to govern the use of the money, and government oversite to ensure any money donated to the charity is used by the charity for its stated purpose.
I know people are concerned about this, and I know many people want to contribute to the forum. We're working hard to lift the burden from EMK financially and of course to ensure the future operation of this site. We don't yet have any idea how long this process will take but rest assured that it has started.
I'm pretty sure we have members who aren't language geeks nor geeks in general