We launched Livetodai back in March 2017 and have continued to grow steadily, whilst our member base isn’t huge we have managed to reach almost every part of the world where Daihatsu’s exist and it is amazing to see the breadth of our user base. We recently just passed the 5 year mark.
As most of you already know this forum is run for the Daihatsu community for free without advertisements or mandatory membership costs. The forum was initially provided in this form as we had free hosting that required no financial commitments, after the first two years we lost that free hosting and have moved to a pay as you go model.
After we were forced to move to this payment model we reached out to the community for donations, we had some one time commitments and some users commit to monthly donations, for each and every person who has donated to the forum we thank you for your efforts, we could never have made it this far without you!!
In recent times we have lost some monthly donators and these users were supplying a large portion of the running costs, it is understandable in the current climate of things, rising costs of living, pandemic, job losses, war in Ukraine etc that some users simply cannot afford to contribute any longer and thus there is nil hard feelings from the admin team, thank you for everything you contributed whilst you could.
With some annual costs coming up such as our SSL certificate renewal, dedicated hosting reservation and the on going storage and compute costs the admin team have decided there is two future options for the forum.
We put out a request to the community, all active members, all users that would feel a loss if they could no longer visit the forum to click the donate now button and not offer a one time donation but a monthly commitment, it can be as small as $2 a month, if we had enough users donating a small amount we could cover the costs, if you would like to commit to more then that you are most welcome and this will help us survive into the future.
We admit defeat and start to organise the shutdown of the forum, we will provide information on how to download your personal data/posts for safe keeping in the future, if we are to go down this path the scheduled date for shutdown would be the 11th of June 2022
While I’m quite new here I’m happy to donate on a monthly basis - sorry to be crass but are you able/willing to share what the approx monthly costs are so I/we could donate accordingly? And maybe a monthly ‘statement of accounts’ for how much money is in the kitty?
Sorry if I’m teaching you to suck eggs here, but re the SSL cert point specifically, why not use a LetsEncrypt certificate which is free, and just needs a little bit of time (<1h) to set up and set to auto renew?
Hey guys new to the forum and for give my ignorance but I’ve only really been a FB member.
Just an idea,
How about setting up a member pack? Yearly fee, sticker pack, keychain with unique member number, access to forums, any other sort of merch for incentive. Fees would be enough to cover all member packs and also put a bit of cream on top to help cover forum financials.
Set it up as a legitimate automotive enthusiast group with monthly/quarterly/annual general meetings. Each state could have sub branches. I realise this would take quite a lot of time and effort but the Dai community is a strong one and I’m quite confident in saying all of us “smol bois” would be quite willing to help out.
I personally could help out with the printing of any logos, stickers T-shirts, hats or that kind of business. I’m sure others are able to jump in and support where they can.
Once again excuse my ignorance if this is something we’ve already done.
Many thanks for the donation, a Badge is coming your way
As for the question RE: Letsencrypt, we initially started the forum using just that, I had auto renewal setup via automation that generally worked 9/10 times… We elected to move to a paid SSL cert when some users where having issues with the Letsencrypt certificate and do not currently plan to go backwards if avoidable.
Evil has detailed the approximate running costs above, this includes things like our database, backups, storage for the forum, emails services, the container host, domain name registration and the SSL certificate. I am sure there is ways to make the site function cheaper but at a cost of the site functioning reliably which is not something we are willing to do, I do not get paid to maintain the forum and therefor do not have a vested interest in maintaining it on a cheap and flaky platform that would require more of my personal time.
[quote=“FrAsErTaG, post:1, topic:5818”]1. We put out a request to the community…[/quote]
[quote=“FrAsErTaG, post:1, topic:5818”]2. We admit defeat and start to organise the shutdown…[/quote]
The 3rd possibility could be found, here: [quote=“FrAsErTaG, post:1, topic:5818”]…without advertisements or mandatory membership costs…[/quote] Due to economic discrepancies between various members’ countries, one cannot realistically expect a forum member from Pakistan to donate as much as a member from Great Britain, for example, given the differences between incomes, currency values and purchasing power in both of those countries.
Introducing annoying advertisements would be the third possibility of which viewers themselves would need to take their own initiatives in countering, through viewing the site through the following browser of which contains an inherent advertisement blocker: www.brave.com . Once downloaded and installed, there will be no noticable difference in structure and speed between this site in either its advertisement-void form or the opposite, except that gaps between posts may appear, depending on the site’s format.
Just an idea
We have already thought about enabling advertisers, with the small traffic we do even without ad blockers (or browsers such as brave) we would make less then $5 a month, throw in things like brave browser and I think we would crack $2 a month.
It just isn’t a viable solution for the amount of monthly traffic we use.
Happy to contribute on an ongoing basis, my man maths says that I’ve saved myself $100 on not needing to buy a new fuel filler neck thanks to a fellow forum member pointing out there was an active recall on it so I owe the forum at least that much!
Keep up the good work guys, I know what running a forum is like ( have recently stood down after 5 years running another automotive forum) so really do get to see what goes on behind the scenes with just keeping things running.
I just moved outside the city, so I need so sort out a few things first, but I’m more than happy to contribute to the forum! It’s a website I visit multiple times a day, the community is great, and I’d hate to see it going offline. I’ll see if I can get a few dutch L7 Club members to donate as well . Keep it up!
I’ve donated.
Last month i sold my cuore so no dai owner anymore. But this forum has helped me with my engine swap and other info, and it would be a shame if it disappeared.
I’ll make sure to make a monthly donation. But the notice of the future of the forum was really small for me. I just noticed it from the corner of my eyes while i was on my phone. Isn’t it an option to make it a pop-up notification? I think allot more people will notice it then.
I really love this forum, just bought some stickers so I really want the forum to continue. Otherwise my stickers will mean nothing
