Has anyone

[Harry]

(06-15-2010 08:14 AM)ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:  I think you're misunderstanding things on a number of levels.
I strongly doubt these big sites rely solely on donations - they probably are funded primarily through advertising or affiliation or similar.  I've seen a number of forums do this.  Donations just provide extra income to the forum owners (after all, users don't know how much the owner is really earning through ads).
Generally, subtle advertising can more than easily cover for hosting costs.  I'm on a dedicated server here, and not the cheapest one ($66/mo).  My site doesn't even need this much power - it could easily do fine on a $10/mo VPS server with 1GB RAM, but ad revenue easily covers for this server (and I'm too lazy to switch).  Any forum which gets a decent amount of traffic, and has advertising, I will seriously doubt relies on donations to keep afloat.  And even if it does, the owner must really consider the stability of such an income stream - typically these can vary a lot, and if you have to match payments with earnings in this situation, you're either going to have to leave a big margin of error, or be willing to contribute funds yourself (or let the site go down, which is unlikely for a large forum owner).
As such, a subscription payment is hardly anything compared to the hosting they have to manage.

Of course, the above is only for established forums, which probably won't convert to another system, so it's rather a moot point.


I think the rest of your post is a bit of an overstatement...

feel free to register and ask these people how they keep the site up and running. http://www.easternuswx.com/bb/index.php?act=idx

Note no ads etc. The two largest sites in that niche ( that one is the largest ) are like that.

I know of plenty of others as well not even in that niche. I know this may seem strange to a few but that is how a good number of the largest sites have started and still go on to this day. Thus donations.

Some such as that site refuses to put ads on their sites for a slew of reasons. Most don't care to have them because of how intrusive the ads are. Thus ugly and clutter up the site. My one site ( MYBB ) is currently run totally off donations and is covered for atleast the next few month's. Ofcourse it is not that big either.

In either case it is not a great incentive to switch forum software when you don't have these options. Plus it doesn't help with growing sites who use MYBB and thus you end up with what we have and thus alot of come and go sites who use MYBB. So i wouldn't say my statement is overstated either.