Would you be willing to crowdfund ES development?

How much would you be willing to give?

  • $0/month

    Votes: 4 19.0%
  • $1/month

    Votes: 6 28.6%
  • $2.5/month

    Votes: 2 9.5%
  • $5/month

    Votes: 6 28.6%
  • $10/month

    Votes: 1 4.8%
  • >$10/month

    Votes: 2 9.5%

  • Total voters
    21

neptronix

Administrator
Staff member
Joined
Jun 15, 2010
Messages
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Location
Utah, USA
Hey all.

As time goes on, phpbb gets more dated.. and sites like facebook continue to take eyeballs away from web forums, which is a shame because facebook does a very bad job of keeping content and making it searcheable, etc. Also, you do not own your content on facebook, and then there's the evilness of Zuckerberg and co :|

Ironically, i'm responsible for starting ES Facebook at a time when there were no ebike groups on facebook and it looked like we were going to lose the forum to an investor. Eventually the facebook group grew to be almost as big as the forum :oops: , and honestly i'm a little ashamed that it turned out that way. But the reason is that facebook has modern features and is much more useable than phpbb.

We hit a wall with phpbb last year. We spent many days investigating alternatives and came up empty handed. We are sort of stuck with it due to the 11 years of content we have. No convertor is able to properly move our 7 gigabytes of text over to a more modern message board software either.

Since we are not ad supported ( thank god ) and non-profit, i'm wondering how many of you would be willing to donate by patreon to fund improvements to the site

The first project would be one of the following ( still undecided ):

1) build a convertor that properly ports our content to a newer platform, or fix an existing one that is broken.
2) add modern features to the phpbb codebase and contribute to all phpbb web forums as a whole.
3) build extensions for phpbb that give us the features we've always wanted.

Any excess money would go to:

1) help pay the hosting bill
2) coffee money for the sysadmin(s)
3) beer money for the moderators.... they need it :lol:

So this is just a tester to see if anyone would be interested.. please fill out the poll.. any feedback would be helpful too.
 
I don't have anything to donate other than ideas, but I'd rather see us "fix" PHPBB, for a variety of reasons.

I'd be glad to help in whatever way I can, but I R not a programmer. :/ Can alpha or beta test though; I'm good at bug reports. ;)
 
I dislike monthly payment programs almost with a passion. I've avoided monthly payments pretty much all my life ( no car payments, no monthly credit card payments and so on) and am very unhappy that certain software companies now offer only that option. It is a big dis-incentive for me. So I would not sign up for any monthly donation. I would, however, be willing to make a donation from time to time as needed in amounts from $5 to $20 to help fund upgrades, etc.
 
Cool.
I was thinking that selling ES Swag would also be a way to add to the pool.
I really like Patreon as a platform for getting donations/donating. It would be my platform of choice. I currently fund a playstation 3 emulator, 3 youtube channels, and 2 podcasts on a total budget of $40 myself.

Some youtube channels are raking in a few thousand dollars a month this way and supporting 2-3 employees. I think it would be cool to support maintenance/development on ES the same way.

It's just an idea i'm floating.
 
a table tennis forum I follow is run and maintained by an online table tennis retailer. While people don't fund it, they do look favorably on the retailer when they buy equipment.

The table tennis forum doesn't have the issue of being anti rival suppliers, though, so it may not work for ES if a supplier ran it.
 
PRW said:
a table tennis forum I follow is run and maintained by an online table tennis retailer. While people don't fund it, they do look favorably on the retailer when they buy equipment.

I really don't like that kind of conflict of interest. We are really lucky that ebikes.ca stays out of things, even though they bought this forum out of the hands of a guy who wanted to really eff it up.
 
neptronix said:
Cool.
I was thinking that selling ES Swag would also be a way to add to the pool.
I really like Patreon as a platform for getting donations/donating. It would be my platform of choice. I currently fund a playstation 3 emulator, 3 youtube channels, and 2 podcasts on a total budget of $40 myself.

Monthly subscriptions are a fantastic idea for the folks receiving the money. I'd go there in a heartbeat if I were on that side of the transaction. And it may be the best overall way to go. But if you do that, you might want to consider leaving a one-at-a-time donate option as well. Otherwise you'll probably leave some money on the table from folks like me.

As it is, the fact that Grin is making this site possible is definitely a factor for me when as I go forward and think about future projects - even though I'm heavily inclined toward optimizing dollars spent. OK - I'll admit it. I'm cheap.

But I am willing to pay a premium to purchase from Grin given the right product etc. In fact, I'm now looking on their website first when I "go shopping."

I'd be happy to wear a Grin hat or slap a Grin sticker on my battery case and pay for the privilege.
 
Just looking at the number of views this thread has, I'm curious if you might get a better response pinning this thread to the top of each page rather than making it a sticky. I know, personally, I skip right over all stickies and only found this by accident.
 
I'm all honesty, ads don't bother me at all. They are everywhere anyways. Pop up ads suck, but I barely notice banners and side ads. I'd say get a few sponsors and have them help fund the forum.
 
Paypal option for me too. Don't like monthly payments but i'll gladly contribute!

I really don't want the forum to get a thousand ads. I think it totally contradicts what ES is now.

Marketing people are the scum of the earth: Selling people stuff they don't need, twisting and exaggerating facts to make a sale
 
An annual payment reminder for $100 would work for me.
 
same here, I don't like subs.

Maybe have both, sub and 1-time ?
 
Agreed. When accepting money there is no reason to not do both methods (subscription and individual) i would contribute and vote no for ads.

The knowledge on here is priceless!

Please do not do the format where paid members get different features than unpaid members. That format has a weird exclusionary vibe to it when you are a noob.
 
I'm also very much against ads and premium features.
Won't happen on my watch. :)

Yes, we could do one time donations in addition to patreon for those who do not like patreon's style of doing things.
That and selling shirts 'n stuff.
 
And "bumper stickers".

I might buy those if they were cheap, to put on my bikes, trikes, and trailers, so poeple can find where to go to learn about them.

But I wouldn't wear a shirt or other clothing for it, because I already have stuff I wear for specific reasons in specific weather/etc conditions, or for work.
 
+1 for the one off donation.
 
Why not take a look at bbpress for wordpress. There are several plugins that can import phpbb to bbpress. Once you have it in bbpress, there are other systems like buddypress that can import or work directly with bbpress.

It seems to me like instead of developing our own encoders to convert the data, or developing a new, better phpbb, it would be cheaper, easier, and faster to move to a wordpress based forum system.
 
zro-1 said:
Why not take a look at bbpress for wordpress. There are several plugins that can import phpbb to bbpress. Once you have it in bbpress, there are other systems like buddypress that can import or work directly with bbpress.

It seems to me like instead of developing our own encoders to convert the data, or developing a new, better phpbb, it would be cheaper, easier, and faster to move to a wordpress based forum system.

I never considered that. What makes bbpress/buddypress better than phpbb?
Do you have an example forum you can show?

Wordpress is also a monoculture and usually has serious unpatched security issues at any given time. Something that sits on it would have to be REALLY REALLY good in order for me to consider moving us that way.
 
I feel the main problem with any funding is how do you stop from endlessly nagging people like AW who pay things forward in kind and only nag people with excess cash? (Assuming the nagging is done automatically.)

If one-time, would it be a sort of countdown to when you got bugged again (like a 1yr or 5yr "subscription")? Or a true one time donation for a specific upgrade to ES?

I'm 50/50 on monthly vs one-time. What I hate about monthly is the number of times I've singed up for something then looked back a year later and found I never used it because of broken access/ lost password / lack of time etc. Especially galling at the times I've gone broke. But strangely I never resented the one-time donations I've given away over the year with no strings. Even though the recipients often didn't accomplish anything.

For me a working search function alone would make ES go from "random infotainment" to a technical resource. Easier photo uploads would be great too. But I loathe FB and anything that flashes distractions and encourages meandering bonoboism.
 
Patreon solved the problem you're talking about some years back. It's an all in one place for monthly subscriptions or donations.
Here is a quick screenshot of my account. I can add a pledge to some content creator, increase a pledge, delete one, etc..
And the whole site uses my credit card and bills me monthly for all my pledges.

2018-07-09-10_44_21-Home-_-Patreon.gif

It's very easy to deal with.

As for the mechanics of how the money is spent and such, we can figure that out later. But i figure there would be a pool of money and whoever is working gets paid a wage out of it for certain things like maintenance, improvements, etc.
 
LeftieBiker said:
I'd also make a one-time or annual PayPal donation.

THIS!

Also, there's a forum that is same format run by a fella with high end programming skills. Actually holding some patents.
The owner of Modernvespa, Jess...he's done all sorts of cool stuff with Phbb. Might be worth asking if he will release anything that would help.
 
neptronix said:
I'm also very much against ads and premium features.
Won't happen on my watch. :)

Yes, we could do one time donations in addition to patreon for those who do not like patreon's style of doing things.
That and selling shirts 'n stuff.

The shirt sales didn't seem robust. Stickers seem popular.
 
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