Sustainability
This is a difficult topic that has long been in the making. I hope to convince you before the end of this topic that this is the right direction to go for this community.
This Forum does not qualify for free hosting anywhere. Since its inception, I have taken it upon myself to pay for the operating costs and to spend personal time improving it and managing it in different ways. This was done not with the intent of profit down the line, but out of sheer passion for the game we all know and love.
After many, many weeks of getting zero views per week, we are now at a point where we average between 5.000 and 10.000 monthly visits. This type of growth has had an impact â I feel itâs time we focus on making this sustainable instead of having a sudden shutdown in the long term because things just became too costly to operate.
For transparency reasons, I am willing to share that at the time of writing (Oct 4th 2021) this website costs around 100 Euro per year to operate, roughly 115 USD. When I started, I was paying around 25 Euro, around 30 USD per year. If we keep growing, this value will naturally increase as well.
Allow me to highlight that the point is not wether or not I am financially capable of covering the costs at the moment, but down the line, as we get more users and visits, this may not be viable for me to pay out of my pocket.
Here are the statistics for most of the month of September:
And here is a breakdown of the consolidated page views, separated by user type:
Take a moment to note how big of a percentage of pages are viewed by anonymous users (people that donât have an account here) and crawlers, which index pages for Google, Yahoo, etc.
So what are the options?
I do not intend on shutting down Memoir 44 Fans! Taking this into account, there are several ways in which we can strive for sustainability here. Iâm going to go through them individually so that you understand why one could consider it.
Data mining / Data selling
Iâve listed this here merely as an option because others websites do it, so you might think about suggesting it. It is illegal in the EU to do anything with usersâ data without consent and Iâm not going to ask consent from users for anything. Iâve said this before and will say it again: forum data and what you post here is not for sale and will never be. Nothing dishonest will ever happen to your data, posts or account: because it is immoral (first and foremost) but also because itâs illegal as per GDPR.
Donations
I am not a fan of this approach because it would be essentially asking for money from the people that contribute the most to this place â the users that come here to interact. There are also other disadvantages, like the unpredictable nature of donations. There could be periods where some might donate and other long stretches without donations.
The process of reaching out for donations is also awkward and I fear it would drive long time users away from the website, which is the last thing I want to do.
Patreon / Subscriptions
This improves on Donations in the sense that there is an explicit expectation to donate per month / per year rather than a single moment. Although I would also consider this, the problem is that people would expect some sort of reward for their subscription, which I feel I would have trouble providing. We could certainly set up special badges in the Forum for subscribers/sponsors/donators, but I canât tell if this would be enough value for people to want to adhere to.
This option also suffers from the same main drawback of the donations approach: asking for money from the people that already give to the community. Aside from that, again, is the cumbersome process of reaching out in order to get more subscribers periodically, which is something I am definitely not comfortable doing.
Adverts
I know ads are not everyoneâs cup of tea, but I would like you to keep an open mind in this section. Please take a second look at the breakdown of page views by user type:
On September 20th 2021, page views by logged in users accounted to only 9% of the total of page views. What if we showed ads only to those 91% that donât log in?
This would, hopefully, create an instance where the users generating the larger portion of the traffic would pay for it, while the users that already browse the Forum would have the exact same experience theyâve had so far. They would not be bothered for donations or subscriptions, which matters if we want to retain these users (we absolutely do).
I cannot imagine that adding these ads would cover all of the expenses, but it would be perfect if we were able to do it. If we had any extra left, we could spend it on more frequent updates and further improve the server infrastructure.
Note: these ads would be non-intrusive, provided by Adsense or some similar respected provider.
What is going to happen in the future?
I have given this topic enough thought in order to feel comfortable adding adverts for non-logged in users, but Iâm also all about transparency, honesty and communication. So Iâve decided to leave this topic here as a discussion and to hear what the community thinks. Iâm confident that most people agreeing that this site needs to be sustainable will also find the advert strategy overall better than subscriptions or donations.
What if people donât agree?
There is room for debate, of course. The most important takeaway from this should be that this site is growing, and with it the need of becoming sustainable. The strategy by which we become sustainable can naturally vary, there is no real reason to go one direction if the community as a whole feels different.
I hope that you will see this as the housekeeping required to maintain memoir44fans.com as the main resource website for Memoir '44 for years to come. If nothing is done, the growth we have seen would eventually lead to increasing invoice amount, which I would be willing to cover â but only up to a point. Having a really great and intense month with lots of visits and user interactions should not make me nervous about the amount to pay, and this sustainability is whatâs going to make me sleep without worries.
Ultimately, I will get the final say in this matter, but Iâm not willing to go the direct opposite as to what the community wants. If there is a strong disagreement, I will consider, for the greater good of the project, to transfer ownership to someone else who is a strong contributor, so long as the moral values that I applied here over time are kept. This will be done only as a last resort, if the community agrees and is at my discretion (after getting legal council), if at all possible.
What do you think?
This is very much an open topic. If you have something to say: about sustainability or any of the strategies here, please make your voice heard by replying to this thread.
) which I think could be another avenue to explore. The rewards for donating would be a custom badge in the Forum, access to a donator exclusive group/category where you would be able to suggest Forum changes, vote about any changes to current infrastructure and posts and request new content for me to post about, etc. If you donated once you would join the exclusive category, and the access is not revoged over time. The requests would of course be tended to according to my availability. In order to follow a fixed target for donations (equal to the yearly spendings), this would have to be done manually and I would have to post the current state of donations and the target. In terms of transparency this isnât ideal but it would work.