delta_foxtrot2 wrote:I'm new here and sorry in advance if my comments upset anyone, I was drawn to this site because of the openness, I really dislike how closed and money driven groundspeak/geocaching.com seem to be.
I also find it astonishing that 1 site costs $3600/yr to run, in fact in this day and age you are better not running your own server and using a virtualised system as there is a lot more benefits, especially as the number of cores increase.
Who ever commented about .org.au v .asn.au, .org.au is cheaper and more recognisable compared to .asn.au
Also having been involved with non-profit assn's in the past I'm more than happy to deal with benevolent dictators and/or informal organisations that are friendly and open.
If you must have advertise or sponsored by bits low key seems to work best, I'm guessing a large percentage would be techno-savvy and possibly have ad blocking installed etc.
Don't sacrafice principals for a quick buck, stuff doesn't make you happy, and large amounts of money can potentially lead to more problems then people think they will solve.
Just a few cents from a rambling newbee, but if this becomes membership driven how is it any different, from an outsiders perspective, than geocaching.com?
Everyone's opinion is welcomed.
It may be worthwhile (if you're inclined) to check the threads talking about the server requirements. At the moment we serve 45K+ caches and 1M+ logs. The calculations required to geospatially determine the caches from your home co-ordinates and provide the cool statistics and graphs that we are known for is non-trivial.
$3,600 (USD) gets us something like this:
https://www.theplanet.com/servers/confi ... &series=18
We have one (or something similar) and it struggles, especially with the forum software. An upgrade won't hurt by the way.
ideology provide us this server and we want / need to move to 2 servers of similar capability. One for the webserver and one for the database server.
If i! continue to provide a server, then we need $3,600USD a year for the second. If a sponsor comes along then we can have two brand new boxes for $7,200USD and i! get to have their box back for their own use again.
The benevolent dictators (I like that term) are against ads per se, but a sponsorship opportunity which is an unobtrusive "sponsored by ... " could mean financial security for a number of years without the need for memberships, ads, other annoyances.
It was too good an opportunity not to present back to the community for discussion. The principles of free and open will not be compromised and I feel they will be enhanced as GCA reaches more and more people through the possible sponsorship opportunities.
As I said, I welcome your comments so please don't be afraid to post what you feel / think.