Ok so hopefully we will continue, but as you guys mull over what I’ve stated consider this.
I dont own the site. Neil does. So any new caretakers of new leadership or transfer get his approval. That’s frankly an easy enough one, as long as the vision of Jim and Deanna continue, but not my call.
Self html hosting: Flat websites are cheap enough but these are flat and no forum directly.
That $32.55 one would work well, or could be stared smaller but if FAOL grew you would have to deal with migration efforts, Also email is an issue, at current activity that is easilly handled by bluehost, but not if you grow.
Forum..
phpBB is good and could be added to the above at no cost. But migration is the issue.
I chose discourse due to it being very actively maintained and the fact phpBB didn’t really handle importing the old content. Discourse takes work but you can do some cool things with it. It has forum stuff, solid permission and reputation tools, anti spam stuff, and has tools to self govern, chat, and makes it easy for image uploads.
Discourse.
Managed hosting so you dont need an admin for sytem updates etc.
To keep the domain, you are looking at $100/month so that means you have to get membership and activity up enough to do some simple ads, not much but enough to cover $100.00 month. Although you could have books printed etc and sell those but frankly you only get about $5.00 each so that is not sustainable at curent activity levels. This is where I was headed though.
Self hosting is cheaper but that means you need a system admin.
Costs: I chose Ionos for hosting the discourse site. This would have held fine until we outgrew them, and I was hoping to move to hosted anyway.
but that doesn’t cover email very well for digests and stuff, and i broke email every time i moved and the forum decided to use defaults and spam the entire user base.
eMail: I chose MailJet. It’s really designed for marketing but it is affordable and can handle large volumes if needed.
WHY?
I am not including this as anything other than giving you the realities.
These are our constraints.
Either :
- we start to grow FAOL then turn it over to a governance board that also includes young adults,
- we let FAOL continue to fade away,
- someone has a better solution,
- or we shut it down.
As always, it’s not my call. After paying for hosting for a couple decades, and trying to keep my involvement to the minimum but still keep the lights on, I do however get a voice.
Mull it over talk to each other, and I’ll bring in as many other interested parties that want to help govern into this conversation.
But when I try to change this site to become self sufficient in the coming year, hand it off to others, and end up pissing off the main contributors… I’m no longer the guy you need driving. Again. I’ll let it stew for a week before I decide what is best for me and the vision (FAOL) of Jim and Deanna.