Monthly donations

Hello!

Inspired by this thread, I came to think about monthly donations. I listen to a great Swedish tech podcast which has to option of automatic monthly donations, via paypal. I would love to have this set up on A2OC. Even though I gladly donate some yearly I think a monthly donation is easier. It's a set and forget thing. It'll probably also make it easier to manage the runnings costs vs. the donations of the forum.

Thanks for the feedback and the suggestion for the format of future donations.

We'll be posting an announcement regarding club funding over the next few days. When opting for the donations model rather than fixed fees last August, we stated this would be reviewed after a year, however with a little over the half way mark we have experienced a simply staggering response from forum members with nearly £2500 donated to the club.

Watch the announcements section for further details over the weekend!

personally im not sure what to think on this whole donation/fee saga! but suggesting other methods of payment to consistently receive money is not a good answer. to me thats just another way of getting more money in.

i dont mind trying to contribute to this forum for whatever knowledge or help i can offer. but im totally against the idea of losing certain criteria just because i didnt donate 'A' sum of money...is this fair on the people who do donate and pay more than others? probably not, but we are not all on the same boat when it comes to dishing out 'X' amount of money whether we can afford it or not!

giving help/info when needed is as good as donating money in my opinion so please dont forget the fundamental issues of a forum, its to serve as a means to help other enthusiasts as best as we can without profiteering, thats my understanding of all forums ive been part of but if the whole idea of donation is to keep the site active then i would like to know where my and other members money is being spent.

i would also say that longer serving members can make judgement very quickly and rightly so when someone like 'joe public' gives an inch and he will take a mile attitude, therefor do you introduce some sort of discipline 3 strike policy or an outright ban, who knows! if that were the case i reckon i wouldve been banned along time ago lol.

im sure plenty of people have had their rants about fees/memberships but introducing a monthly donation like a direct debit for this forum just stinks im afraid. can you imagine if members on here charged for their knowledge as a pay per reply option lol

by the way i will be looking for my gold watch after 10 years service

rant over

cammy

Whats wrong with a few relevant adverts helping towards the cost of running the forum?

All the forums i have ever been on have no pay for view/donations. (I'm a moderator at another Audi forum)

Most people are all for helping out when they can, but theres other ways to bring in income for a forum.

Thanks for the feedback guys.

Regarding your 'rant' Cameron - members are encouraged to give us feedback and providing it's constructive and not abusive it's welcomed. Your post doesn't really read like a rant but hear you loud and clear that you think monthly subscription 'stinks'

No decisions will be made on future funding until the democratic review later in the year.

The money is spent on maintenance and development costs. Web hosting used to be free. Now its several hundred pounds a year although I'm sure you'll agree it's very reliable. We'd like to invest in more robust back up facilities for the servers in case we have a catastrophic issue with the database. ( sorry I'm no tech so don't understand the details of this). We would like to (but as yet haven't been able to) develop the merchandising section. As the club is run by volunteers this is always going to be difficult as this element takes a lot of work.

One example - we ran a poll to see if members wanted a second manufacturing run of the A2OC 's line' badges. These are expensive to produce with a minimum order value. We invested in these following the poll - unfortunately not everyone who pledged to buy one (or two) did so.

There are projected costs for legal fees relating to formal registration of the club to keep us right with HMRC and we have had suggestion to register the club as a charitable trust which will further assure its future protection.

These are just a few examples, and you'll perhaps note in the recent club announcement that we have placed a hold on donations and seek suggestions for ways to invest the money in the club for the benefit of the members.

With regard to advertising, we did consider this option and it was debated in a 'membership consultation' available on the announcement forum. The consensus view were in favour of the current set up which avoids advertising and pop ups/ embedded links.

In reality, even though we have over 10,000 registered users since 2002, we only have some 500 or so 'active' users. A clean up of the user database is planned as a significant number of profiles are inactive and some users haven't logged on for several years.

We suggest a starting point of no posting history and inactivity for 2 years as a 'cut off' point.

The subject of money is always going to be an emotive one when people are used to getting anything they want in terms of information free from the Internet. The reality is that the club does cost money to run, and assure that it's protected. As the car ages gracefully and heads for classic status we hope to protect this friendly forum that promotes the enjoyment and preservation of this fantastic wee car.

All feedback and suggestions in support of that aim are gratefully received.