Response to the Future of NikonGear.net/.com/.org

[KarlMera]

25860 today, not bad

[Jürgen Pfeiffer]

25860 today, not bad

?

[Ann]

25860 today, not bad

So they come to visit (which is great!)  but how do we encourage them to pitch-in $25 to become Supporters?!

[KarlMera]

to pitch-in $25 to become Supporters?!

Why not 1€ for all members?

[Birna Rørslett]

Most visitors are sporadic or one-time readers. Same as with most sites on the web. No way they will become paying members.

The critical point is the existrence of content creators. Meaning members who contribute in discussions and post photos.

[KarlMera]

No way they will become paying members.

20 or 25 is too expensive. 1€ would be fair.

[Birna Rørslett]

Setting subscription to 1-2 Euro is a joke. It'll simply means NG has to shut down in less than 6 months. Unless we get 100x the number of current subscribers in those months before bankruptcy.

Currently our server is under heavy load, probably due to hacking.

[KarlMera]

There are today 29000, there is a big interest

[Birna Rørslett]

Mostly hackers, is my estimate.

[Birna Rørslett]

I'm chatting with site support now. The NG server receives > 500,000 visits per day at present. That is highly unusual, to put it mildly. Most 'visits' are from Brazil, US, Vietnam, and India. Nearly 98% of these accesses last < 30 secs. So much for  their interest in "photography".

[Birna Rørslett]

Our VPS was in itself robust enough to handle the current massive load, but the cPanel subsystem hung on an update conflict. That caused slow response in the last hours.

Apparently, after a forced server reboot, and some behind-the-curtain actions, NG is running happily at full speed again.

[Bruno Schroder]

When I looked at the logs earlier this year, many of the hits came from cloud providers' security assessment services, checking the validity of a URL. Very few accesses actually corresponded to a real reading of a post.

[Ian Watson]

20 or 25 is too expensive. 1€ would be fair.

€20-25 per year is downright cheap for what we enjoy here. €1 is an insult.

[Birna Rørslett]

Brathe normally, Ian.  As I said, NG cannot exist if "subscribing" was 1 Euro. We would need thousands of subscribers, and that scenario is a pipe dream.

[KarlMera]

€1 is an insult.

No, it is a suggestion. It is not fair that 88 pay for 2400, all members could pay 1€, that would be a fair possibility.