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For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
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Anyone who gives more than $1 a month gets a special forum status that allows everyone else to break the Glorious Edict towards them.
I think something like that to get seed money to fund the initial transition and legal / regulatory stuff will be necessary, but I'm pretty certain we're going to have to decide and agree on our organizational structure, officers, bylaws, and some of those basic things before we can really start moving forward with collecting money.
I definitely think the PA organization should be providing at the very least information on the amount raised through their $1 'Forumer' tier pledges and past enrollment numbers to set some sort of very basic baseline on support. I also think once we've got a basic organization structure getting our subscription / tiers and whatever ongoing funding we can get going would be a smart idea just to get things rolling.
I imagine up front there will probably be some whales doing some bigger donations / heavy lifting, but other than the treasurer who might have to know some details it should be completely off-limits to discuss or identify who donated what. If there are higher tiers it should be something like $1 / $5 / $10 (e.g. nothing to identify the 'whales') and any benefits should be purely QoL / cosmetic.
We need a sober analysis of the cost of this thing and to put rubber to the road and ask people to pay. If not enough people do, well, we're on to looking for another solution.
I think we will need to start fundraising as early as possible. Agreed that up front costs should probably be treated as separate from whatever the longer term plan is, but I don’t think you can wait for a full plan before starting. With something like kickstarter I think there’s usually a mechanism for returning the money if everything falls through. And it might help make decisions if we know what initial funding levels look like.
For people concerned that they won’t want to fund whatever the forum becomes they can just wait for more clarity, but there’s probably a not insignificant number of people willing to put money upfront just to try and provide incentive/hope to keep things moving forward.
Edit - also the earlier you start the less political ad like you have to be in the obnoxiousness of the requests. “PAF needs your support right now! You online life is about to be erased! Donate now or things will get serious!!! I will text you every day until decision day just in case.”
Do you have any idea of what the potential tax burden would be on something like this, like in rough % of total donations? Is there something equivalent to a personal income tax "standard deduction" where we only have to pay tax if we take in over a certain amount, or are we going to have to deal with taxes even if we're only pulling in a couple thousand a year and spending it all on hosting and legal fees?
Legos are cool, MOCs are cool, check me out on Rebrickable!
We should absolutely not look at ads as a means to supplement forum use.
I just saw this, and as it happens, there is a discussion in a different thread about this.
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/46784339/#Comment_46784339
I asked most of the things you did, and as a non-mod, can answer a bit about the rest, but might be wrong:
1 : Costs => see other thread, but vanilla is quite high
2 : DAU / MAU => I asked those, see again, other thread
3 : The last official PA staff has retired from the forums, the current staff is unsupported. There is a tenuous link with PA, in that 1 staff member has said something in the announcement, but right now it's: Unpaid volunteers & whatever Vanilla support offers.
About the sub-forum: I don't think it's that interesting to know the DAU per sub-forum, if you close one, the users will migrate to another, we need the totals, it's not like you marry a sub-forum.
Especially a tech savvy forum of all places. Adblock must be used by 90% of the forum at the low end.
Talk about penny-wise dollar foolish. How much time you gonna chase futzing with the algorithm that picks up on a half dozen threads spread across 2 sub forums that discusses political hot topics and starts dolling out truth social/prepper shit?
Right, to specify this further:
1. initial costs of even starting to set up a place. Munkus mentioned getting a lawyer to set up some documents. I also assume we'll need a bank account
2. funding needed to actually build and launch the nuforums.
So to get to part 2 we definitely need to get some ducks in a row. If only because Kickstarter has community guidelines to make sure there's at least a veneer of quality to the stuff on their site.
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As for info on how many Forumer tier patreons they had... I wouldn't bother asking. It was only added to give us a chance to show that we valued the forum. The money that came from it will be minimal and I know I (as someone who likes Penny Arcade) went for the 5$ tier instead to get some more perks in.
Like, if we intend to incorporate, get project management software, buy a domain, get email hosting of some stripe tied to it...
There is a baseline monthly opex and some initial capital expenditures that isn't even the forum itself.
We probably need to know what that number is so we can start fundraising towards it, or get someone to just eat initial costs as a loan out of the future corporate purse or whatever.
501c7 clubs are tax exempt, they don't have to pay anything as long as they follow the regulations for the designation. You have to file every year but it's not onerous.
The tax implication comes for donators, who cannot deduct it from their returns. If someone gave us a thousand bucks, that wouldn't reduce their income the same way it would if they gave to a 501c3 org. The c7 is specifically set up to help clubs run their clubhouses without getting annihilated, but also not let them be tax shelters.
There goes the idea of getting War Thunder to sponsor us.
Ok, bad joke, but it feels like all my favorite YouTubers are all of a sudden sponsored by War Thunder...
I would shoot for about $1000 to get everything situated. It really depends on how much someone like @spool32 feels comfortable DIYing, a lot of that cost to me was using a registered agent to kind of handle all the notification stuff in my state. But there might be a lot less rules (like the newspaper shit in my state) and much lower costs to pick up things like EIN for a 501c.
The bottom is falling out of podcast/video ad revenue also.
Combination of google trying to keep people captive on their domains and people skipping through sponsored content sections… advertising is not working like it used to.
At our scale the revenue we would get from ads would not be worth the time spent managing what ads are acceptable on our platform.
I mean - look at the hot bullshit that shows up on the ads here if you leave them exposed.
Honestly the better bet is to have a bunch of prominent community members start up twitch streaming under the forums umbrella and have us tune in to drive up viewership. You'd probably make 1000 times as much with a dozen viewers than you would with a 1/4 million ad views. I know there's folks that stream things like D&D, that might help.
Maybe! There's definitely a group of folks who enjoy watching people suffer through games like dark souls so maybe Satisfactory/factorio have them too.
i almost made affiliate in a month doing that last year but it turns out i don't want to be a streamer
but think of all the money you could make us streaming everquest 1 chanus
Making sure we have a funding source, and if it is just the (5-10-50) people who are already throwing money at PA we might as well recapture that money that would go into a black hole between now and Memorial Day if they are still funding the PA Patreon.
We need a structure setup first, we've got plenty of people who know how this work and can get the whatever legal structure setup in a week and getting funding for the transition. That seems to be the #1 thing to get going, a treasurer who can accept and manage money for the new forums separate from PA corp.
This - we need to empower people with the latitude to execute on stuff, get the structure in place, and pick people to run point on defining the tech architecture, etc.
There are a lot of us and not everything can happen by committee. We don’t really have time for that.
I'm guessing that once we have a solid legal entity that is going to be the new PA forum community and can throw out a hole for people to anonymously (edit with accountability) throw money into we'll find plenty of funding to get us through the transition period.
I’ll dual track until I stop posting here, but as soon as this place is no longer available I am stopping my sub.
The only thing I ever wanted from that payment was to support this hidey hole. I don’t think I have ever watched them stream or listened to a single podcast. I own no pins.
It’s been the forum.
PSN:Furlion
Also, we're in the "setup phase" and we don't have the Guy/Gal who's real good with numbers oboard yet.
Ok cool. I assume once we have those numbers though we are going to poll the community somehow to see what sort of donations we can expect?
PSN:Furlion
Otherwise we'll have to form a team and rob a bank or something.
Oceans 11 except it's 2000 people at keyboards and after 6 months the money is still in the vault
With some accurate monthly pageview numbers we can do some better research on new solutions to see what will meet our needs. For example, if we can get by with 100GB of data storage and a million page views a month, we can do (just as an example), Xenforo's Standard cloud hosted service for $100 a month (or $1080 a year). Then we can work backwards to see what sort of donations the majority of the community is comfortable with to determine what kind of tiers we'd aim for and what degree of additional fundraising we'd need to shoot for.
In that example, if we polled the community and found 150 people happy to give $1 a month, and another 30 people willing to give $5 a month, we'd know that we would easily exceed our funding needs on recurring donations alone. But if only 70 people were willing to give $1 a month and 5 people were willing to give $5 a month, we'd know that we're in a very tight spot and would either need to look into alternative funding, or we'd need to scale back our needs (or look into cheaper self hosted solutions).
Yeah you'd want some extra for all the administrative costs associated with tax filings and running things and paying for things here and there.
I think you're right in the ballpark with those numbers though, minor
That's exactly what i wanted to see. Thank you.
PSN:Furlion
I'm thinking it would be a good idea to at least try to survey the entire community (anonymously?) and see how many current members are interested in switching to a new forum, and how many are willing to contribute financially on a one time or recurring basis.
Well Ramius' posted numbers do put us perilously close to 4M views/month which is on the upper end of the top tier plan. If even a quarter of those come over then we can't count on this cheaper plan
Well, I have two theories. Both entirely unfounded by any inside knowledge, but I'd like to think they're reasonably educated guesses.
1. When we move, we can't expect anywhere near all of our current posters and lurkers to transition over. My personal, wild, off the top of my head guess would be that we probably lose half of the people who are reading these forums. Of course, the ones most likely to fall away into the ether are the ones who post far less (or not at all), so that's not to say we'll see dramatically less posting, but I'd bet our page views drop a lot from that.
and 2. I also suspect that a lot of our pageviews currently come from crawlers. Even robots.txt is a relic from a time when crawlers were much better internet citizens than they are now. Which is why I also think we could do ourselves a huge favor by locking all threads behind a login. Or, at the very least, the vast majority. We're almost certainly not going to be gaining a lot of random new members, so I don't see a ton of benefit to leaving the door wide open and getting hit for that.
Whether those two theories hold water, and whether the two combined is enough to get us down to a much more manageable (and affordable) traffic level? I couldn't say for sure. But this is another situation where more insight into the specifics on the back end would probably help us a lot in making those decisions. But yes, a general poll that asks "Are you planning to register on the new forums?" and another one that asks what donation level you'd be comfortable being at ($0, $1, $3, $5, $10) would give us information to work with. And at this point we need as much info as we can scrape together to make some choices.
I should also note that most cloud hosted options will give you some leeway on tiers. For example, Xenforo's policy is that they'll warn you if you go over your pageviews on your selected tier, and if it happens more than (I believe) two months in a row, they just automatically shuffle you up to the next tier. Obviously that's still a blow to have to jump up a tier on pricing, but at least we'd see it coming a couple months out and could either mitigate page views in some way or to into fundraising emergency mode.