Hello all! I'm writing you because we have a problem: the disk space in the forum is getting to the 50GB limit. This is due to the amount of photos, videos, files and posts uploaded together with all the files from the old forum. We need to upgrade to the 150GB plan and this has a bigger cost monthly (or annually). So... I know this is ugly to say but we need more donations. Actually there are only 3-4 people donating but there are dozens, hundreds of users enjoying the forum. If you are enjoying all this... can you become a supporter with just a mere 3-5€/$ monthly? This is just what 2 coffees cost and this will let us continue offering everything (remember, uploading photos is easy and free here). From now on, and until we get the problem solved, uploading photos and media is disabled. Thanks to everyone.
Sad to read I am part of the very small group of contributors. WML is not yet running into this issue, but has an even smaller group of financial supporters. Feature and model requesters we have plenty of though
Although just a temporary bandage, can you compress all images larger than 1MB? On WML, we are using the CDN option for the majority of the images to most users. The compressed/ web optimized images are actually quite decent.
Monthly donation set up. I honestly had no idea how the forum was hosted and clicked on the link expecting Hugo to be saying he needed funds for a bigger hard drive. I have 42GB of catalogues on this PC so can understand how 50GBytes doesn't go far. I wonder if Hugo has ever looked at advertising. This is about the only forum I use which never shows any. Tapeheads seems to be sponsored by Pacific Audio. After looking at watches on eBay an economics forum I frequent was showing me watches on the right hand side of the forum posts. Again I have no idea how such Adsense ? placements work but I presume it is how other sites get their funding. Good luck and lets hope the site space can be expanded.
Stereo2go and Boomboxery had been two forums which were proud of being non-ad sites for all these years. Even when the other hi-fi forums with larger user base have been ad supported, these two sites remained ad-free till date. But of course, we need to support the team who are upkeeping the site, which I myself didn't do till recently.
I guess compressing all the images will be quite a task: find a plugin that does so with Xenforo and recompress them. But I think what differentiates us from the rest is that we offer free image hosting, already with limits that I set up once I installed this foro a few years ago. But I'll digg for info about that. I think with a few supporters we can reach those 35$/mo. With only 5-6 users donating 5$/mon I'll put the rest.
Thank you guys, I've received several generous donations in the last days and I'm so proud of you who help support this forum. The 'problem' here (if I call it problem, but I'll say it's the special feature that makes us different) is that we host any photos or videos without problem and without external services... those services (like Tinypic) who killed thousands of photos in the old forum. So I'ld like to keep the image hosting free if we just find a group of supporters that help to pay the bill. For a 2000 user communitty shouldn't be a big issue, right?
Thanks AE_Stereo. We have a few ads but they are free for the owners because I think supporting them we also help the community with their belts, repairs, cassettes and all that.
OK I donated. Why not. Merry Christmas Stereo2go forums! But there should be more strict image file size limits to prevent data size growing too massive in future. And video too? I didn't even know that could be done. I would remove that feature and let people use youtube
I feel guilty... I used a lot of photos even though I almost always stayed within the limits (1200x900) I will make my donation as soon as possible
There might be an anonomous one in there.... How about ebay links, I don't know how they work but the mega-thread is pretty popular.