Subscriber Package

Hobart

Originally posted by Cultellus
Right, if Dev was God, boards was the world and it took 7 days to create board in all its glory...
Cloud is the guy who would give God the bandwidth to do it.

?? Back to sleep for me.

Hobbes

Originally posted by Cultellus
Right, if Dev was God, boards was the world and it took 7 days to create board in all its glory...
Cloud is the guy who would give God the bandwidth to do it.

and regi would be the guy with the pitchfork handing out apples to all the posters.

I hear the subscription you get free cake.

DeVore

Originally posted by Hobart
Just being Devil's Advocate here Dev but I just feel the need to clarify your motives/terminology here. Am I right in stating the following:

1) You/Boards are calling this User Enhancement Pack a Supporters Pack. Ok. So by calling it a supporters pack you offer a little more to those Users/Members who buy/subscribe to this pack with the understanding that it will show some (albeit small) allegience on their part to the boards.ie site/community.


Correct.



2) You plan to use any funds raised form this to get a round of drinks for the admins and to help boards 'grow'. Ok. So a percentage will go towards a bit of a shin-dig once a year (for example) and the rest into a bank account to pay Regi/Alt-Regi for 2 days a week (or whatever is needed) most weeks of the year.


Also correct mostly. We may use the money to (for example) house another server to improve stability/reliance.
But noones running away to the Carribean on this




3) You will never charge for acces to the boards.ie message boards.


Correct.
Nor will we sell mailing lists, do popup-ads, sell sig-space for advertisment or any of the other stupid irritating ****ed up greed-driven things that are only done to maximise "shareholder value" and make people money by killing any goose in range, in case it *might* be golden.

Does my rant look big in this??



Can I also ask the question (and you can tell me to fcuk off if you want to) but I am surprised that boards.ie is not a succesfull commercial adventure at this stage. Why not?

How do you make money from it? (if you say ads I will laugh until I barf. Ads make pocket-money...)

It is successful, we're dead chuffed with it! We just dont feel the need to milk it because then it becomes nasty and loses what it has.

DeV.

DeVore

Actually most people seem to think that there is some hierarchy in the admins or that I'm the "owner" of Boards.

Let me dissuade you from that impression:

I have the biggest mouth of the admins. I also have been fascinated by the internet and communities since I first used usenet back in '88.
I'm a militant cúnt who delights in causing pain to people who screw around with our community. I'm very good at finding stuff on people and hurting them in original and occasionally funny ways.

Combine that with the fact that I code badly and havent the patience for the commercial side of things, I got put in charge of managing the community and muppet-patrol.

Dont mistake the fact that I have a big gob and a fair sized ego with some form of superiority in the admin ranks. We're a team and we work real good together. Beyond that we dont have a structure as such.

For example if I want something installed and xor says "thats a piece of **** and it shouldnt go on the server"... we listen to him.
(I bitch and moan but we still listen )

DeV.

DeVore

Originally posted by seamus
....and will we get personalised urls, like http://devore.boards.ie ?

We'd like to do that.

We're looking into the scalability of this... there are some technical issues to do with having 1000 such dns entries.

DeV.

regi

Could do it with dns wildcards too, matching with your username.

Puck

puck.boards.ie would be :ninja:!

Pablo

it might be an idea to give people a 30 day free trial , to get them hooked. :ninja:

DeVore

I hate that sort of FREE TRIAL stuff. Its always dodgy.

Tech stuff is dans area, if we can do it we will. No promises.

DeV.

Gordon

I think the idea of a free trial is great but would be much harder to implement. 2 weeks would be better though.

Dazzer

I cant believe people think a little more than 1 euro a week is too expensive?

CuLT

Originally posted by Dazzer
I cant believe people think a little more than 1 euro a week is too expensive?

By your logic cars are inexpensive to buy, after all whats 14.99 a month when you have a job?

I don't think its expensive, just playing Devil's Advocate .

DeVore

Just because someone cant buy the supporters pack (cos they are broke or a student or what have you) doesnt mean anything.

Some of us have jobs and are willing to put up cash to stabilise something thats fun for us to be part of.
We have the cash to do it and wont miss it. If others cant afford it, I see no problem standing them a pint

I mean, thats kinda the admins' view from the start, we still never expect to see the cash we've put into it come back to us. This is our hobby I guess in a way. You dont look for a return on a hobby. [1]

DeV.

[1] though I sometimes think I would prefer if my hobby didnt run 24/7 , eat 2 gigs of bandwidth a day and involve 7000 other people. I mean, what was wrong with stamp collecting, Tom!

p

Had an idea for a good service for the sub package.
Blogs.

Basically just give a person their own forum,
which only they can start threads on. Other people can post replies which actually are comments.

It'd be a bit of messing with the templates to make it more bloggy, but seems liek a good subscriber package thing anyway.


- Kevin

seamus

Blogs are part of the package. Everyone gets their own personal rantspace.

It'll probably result in the death of boards.ie, because everyone will have vented on their blog instead of posting on a forum

KdjaCL

If this turns out to be successful is the bandwidth and resources there to cope with all the extra usage and resources?

Boards has issues like all Vbulletin sites they dont like being up all the time and need a rest if someone is paying for something on boards wont they be a bit pissed if its down?

/methinks of the constant daily abuse i give a certain webhost called Siteturn for downtime.

Also in reference to other websites like Something Awful they have more than a forum on offer.

Not nitpicking im sure i will get the pack either ways.

kdjac

p

Originally posted by seamus
Blogs are part of the package. Everyone gets their own personal rantspace.

It'll probably result in the death of boards.ie, because everyone will have vented on their blog instead of posting on a forum

Ah cool, that's what I get for not reading.

lol

- Kevin

Pablo

There will be a subscriber package in vb3, via paypal I think.

Cork

100,000 people chopped up their credit cards to avoid paying a €40 government levy.

Unless Boards.ie offer something completely differant for their subscriber pacage. But they are many message boards out there that don't charge. eg. peoples republic of cork, clarehurlers etc.

There is content supplied on the Irish Times & Hotpress websites - no that changing an annual fee works for them.

But I think charging for a service that is available for free on another site will not work.

This is why, what is going to be offered has to be needed as well as differant to the current offering.

If not members will defect to other message boards.

Mercury_Tilt

This post has been deleted.

p

Well I'd imagine the rule would be almost identical to having your own webpage.

You can put your own things up theire, to a reason.

e.g. blatantly posting illegal links(if there is such a thing) would be a no-no.

Though it would be a personal site so I don't think you'd have moderators for them. If you did I certainly wouldn't pay for it.

- Kevin

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

leeroybrown

This thread keps oming back around to this.

The subscribers package would just be a few incentives for members who feel like supporting boards to part with cash. I'd pay if to support Boards, the extra services would just be a bonus.

Sangre

Okay I like the idead of the 'supporter' pack, a nice way to help out with running of the boards.
To me its not really the content of the pack that counts but what it is doing for the community.

Unfortunately atm, I would now be able to pay for this pack and I just want to ask the admins not to make the pack too good or too important.
I fear that their may be a boards.ie support pack elitism, probably subconsciencly though. People thinking I pay for this so I can give the muppet cráp etc, or I can post whatever I want I paid for this!

This is probably me just worrying for nothing since most of those who get the pack will be regular upstanding citizens.

But I'd hate to think that me and those who cant pay ie students were missing out on something that they would love to be involved in.

Thorbar

Sign me up for a year please just a few questions about the sevice.

What are the chances of having a DC hub being setup?

What are the chances of having a Counterstrike server hosted by boards being setup?

How much webspace are we getting and will there be php/mysql support?

If I turn into a retard and get banned from boards.ie 6 months into my subs will I still have access to my blogs/webspace/email/pictures?

If I upload a custom avatar and someone copies and pastes it as their custom avatar will I be able to skull f00k them?

Will you be having a last ten posts in blogs on the front page kinda like the last five updates to columns in fortress.ie?

Maybe you could get one of your sponsers to print a pile of boards.ie t-shirts with ads on the back ala komplett, hosting365.ie and elara and throw this in for free with the pack?

DeVore

Originally posted by Thorbar
Sign me up for a year please just a few questions about the sevice.

What are the chances of having a DC hub being setup?

Eh? None. Ask around, theres a dublin one organised through the broadband forum.

What are the chances of having a Counterstrike server hosted by boards being setup?

We already have a NS server up on troll (cos Regi likes it )... beyond that, very little chance. Its not our thing and we'd be muscling in on some people's areas to do that. I wouldnt say its impossible but its not on the agenda just now.

How much webspace are we getting and will there be php/mysql support?

Eh? Whats this webspace you are talking about? We're offering services here, not ftp access and webspace (which we already do in the members area).

If I turn into a retard and get banned from boards.ie 6 months into my subs will I still have access to my blogs/webspace/email/pictures?

Yes, or we'd refund the remainder. If you DO retain access, you can imagine the staring eye of Sauron on your account though
We havent sat down and thought that through just yet but the first muppet to bleet about his "rights" as a result of supporting boards will get 50 quid thrown back at him I can tell you.

If I upload a custom avatar and someone copies and pastes it as their custom avatar will I be able to skull f00k them?

If its the same we will police it. The system wont allow two files with the same name as it stands.

Will you be having a last ten posts in blogs on the front page kinda like the last five updates to columns in fortress.ie?

Yes, thats already there now.

Maybe you could get one of your sponsers to print a pile of boards.ie t-shirts with ads on the back ala komplett, hosting365.ie and elara and throw this in for free with the pack?

Thats actually not a bad idea. I'll have a think about it. The cost of printed t-shirts is a LOT and probably wouldnt be feasible.
I dont like branding them either but if it was someone we got along with like H365 or Komplett it wouldnt seem like a sell out.

DeV.

Thorbar

Didn't know about the DC hub set up through the BB forum nice one.

Honestly there's only really one Irish cs server active at the moment so I think there's loads of space for another server if you got a few of the lads from the cs board to admin/run it then you might inject a bit of life back into the community.

So any eta on when all this will be starting up?

DeVore

It rolled out to user-beta-test today. There are a few people who have been granted access to give it a good kickin' to test it.

DeV.

hussey

Just one question/suggestion

would it ever be possible for users to be able to have a php/servet/cgi access?

not for everyone as that could be bad, but for some trust worthy ppl who just want to test stuff etc.?

ecksor

Maybe. Not soon though.