Hi all, sorry for the late reply on this, I’m pretty bad at putting pen to paper
When we moved over from the MSN forum in 2009, I set up the new forum being hosted by Zen, and spent many an hour transferring all posts from back to 2002 over to the new forum, not wanting to lose anything.
With annual hosting cost of around £190 per year, within this price we get in package:
5 Data Bases, one we use for the forum, one for the photo gallery and one for Marks parts site, and two spare.
I have also purchased a number of domain names all being forwarded to our forum, a couple of the top of my head are:
Lanciabeta.co.uk lanciabeta.com betaboyz.co.uk lanciabetaparts.co.uk
Everything is registered in my name, and is paid annually by me.
Over the years we have tried single line advertising which paid around half the yearly cost, with Mark Wastnidge paying the balance, this only lasted for two years.
Nowadays we rely on your generous forum donations with Mark and myself making up the balance.
Marks parts site is run separately from the forum, and I set it up as a favour to a mate and to also help Beta owners source parts, I have never charged Mark for this and is done a totally voluntary basis, as I do with admin of the forum.
My Beta has now been off the road for 3 years now
, and what with work being away for 12 hours a day, and developing my photography business (spending 35 days a year at race tracks) most of my computer time is spent editing photos, or if you've seen my Facebook page you will get the idea
I’ve become less active at events and on the forum, but behind the scenes I’m still busy keeping forum updated and backed up.
From my point of view the forum is very safe for the future, and I have absolutely no plans to move it on or use it to make money, it’s something I feel very proud to be part of.
If anything was to happy to me, my wife and close family know how much time I have put into the Forum, Matt and John B would be given all relevant information to keep it going
Where do we go in the future ?
1- I have thought about setting up a Beta Forum Facebook group, but looking at other clubs that have gone down this route, my own opinion is, valuable info could be lost, at least the forum has a search facility, and the pages also come up on a Google search, it would be good to hear other peoples thought on this?
2- I used to attend most events in the year with my Beta, but as mine is off the road I don’t get out as much as I would like, would anyone be interested in a role of Events Coordinator/s, (perhaps for different regions ?) we used to get great turnouts at most events we listed on our calendar.
3-Regarding the funding, it would be great if we could come up with a simple way to admin this, perhaps Mark would pay a set amount per year, then the rest via members/classified adverts??
any thoughts ??
4- Lastly I would like to thank everyone who has made the forum what it is today, no politics, no in house arguing, just a nice place to be
Thanks
Tony Harrison
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