General Discussions
This is the place to discuss general issues related to the U-boat war or the war at sea in WWII.
RE: Members Area - probably cancelled
Posted by:
MCE
()
Date: December 17, 2000 08:15PM
<HTML>Some ramdom thoughts of mine...
0) It would be extremely sad to see this magnificent site go away, or otherwise become unavailable in practice.
1) Before deciding to switch the whole site to become a pay site, please (re)consider using advertisements, especially on the forum pages, which I suspect to be the ones visited most often nowadays.
I must say that I have some doubts on whether making the whole site a pay site would work. I would not be surprised to see the overall number of visitors go down too much for it to be worhtwhile. But then again, I don\'t have much of a clue as to how many regular visitors there are compared to the occasional ones, so I might be wrong.
2) Several long time forum visitors have stated in this forum that they\'re willing to pay 40-50$ for access to the member area anytime. I would assume that many of these have actually seen the preliminary member area, or do not even care what exactly they\'d get for their money. If this is the case, I would suggest to clean up the look and feel a bit and release it \"as is\", even if it only covers a small part of the cost of running the site. Adding new sections may indeed not be financially worthwhile, but the investment in the existing stuff cannot be undone anyway, so...
3) If it were my decision (and based on the obviously rather incomplete knowledge of the situation that I have), I\'d seriously consider opening up the (frozen) member area as suggested above, even if the site has to be moved to a cheaper hosting company. Every dollar helps.
4) If the member area as such does not work out, then instead of making it cost a fixed amount, I would indeed seriously consider setting up a donation system where a donation of (say) 40$ or more automatically gives member area access. I\'ve seen at least one person stating that he\'d be willing to pay 100$, so... Of course, donations smaller than 40$ should also be accepted, they just wouldn\'t buy anything \"tangible\". Very large donations (for some definition of \"very\") should buy something extra though, such as a bit of visibility.
PS for Gummi: I\'ve been walking around in the member area making notes of whatever I think can be improved. I\'m planning on combining them all into one e-mail somewhere during the coming week.</HTML>
0) It would be extremely sad to see this magnificent site go away, or otherwise become unavailable in practice.
1) Before deciding to switch the whole site to become a pay site, please (re)consider using advertisements, especially on the forum pages, which I suspect to be the ones visited most often nowadays.
I must say that I have some doubts on whether making the whole site a pay site would work. I would not be surprised to see the overall number of visitors go down too much for it to be worhtwhile. But then again, I don\'t have much of a clue as to how many regular visitors there are compared to the occasional ones, so I might be wrong.
2) Several long time forum visitors have stated in this forum that they\'re willing to pay 40-50$ for access to the member area anytime. I would assume that many of these have actually seen the preliminary member area, or do not even care what exactly they\'d get for their money. If this is the case, I would suggest to clean up the look and feel a bit and release it \"as is\", even if it only covers a small part of the cost of running the site. Adding new sections may indeed not be financially worthwhile, but the investment in the existing stuff cannot be undone anyway, so...
3) If it were my decision (and based on the obviously rather incomplete knowledge of the situation that I have), I\'d seriously consider opening up the (frozen) member area as suggested above, even if the site has to be moved to a cheaper hosting company. Every dollar helps.
4) If the member area as such does not work out, then instead of making it cost a fixed amount, I would indeed seriously consider setting up a donation system where a donation of (say) 40$ or more automatically gives member area access. I\'ve seen at least one person stating that he\'d be willing to pay 100$, so... Of course, donations smaller than 40$ should also be accepted, they just wouldn\'t buy anything \"tangible\". Very large donations (for some definition of \"very\") should buy something extra though, such as a bit of visibility.
PS for Gummi: I\'ve been walking around in the member area making notes of whatever I think can be improved. I\'m planning on combining them all into one e-mail somewhere during the coming week.</HTML>
