Now That Blowing Wind Is A Privately Owned .org Domain

[bukitpanjang]

- will there be any transparency into how much personal funds or advertising revenues etc put into managing the domain + webhosting issues?

- are there any future plans as to grow blowing wind into a portal and move on beyond just a forum?

- who are the full time admin. can we have an "about us page" ie, a clear "if something goes wrong" who can we approach for specific matters etc...

Edited March 21, 2008 by HendryTan

[oralb]

tks for the note Bukit panjang, here a few words from our side

- All mods are on voluntary basis, hence there isnt a "full time" mod, we work based on our interest and our passion in the forum

- currently there isnt any plan to go commerical, eg into a full portal, as at this moment we neither have the resources and the desire to fight with the commerical portal like fridae and trevvy.

- should there be any feedback, you can either post it in our feedback folder (yes we have one) or directly PM to any of the mods team

[HendryTan]

Dear Bukit Panjang

1. I edited your previous posting to remove a para on advs.

I appreciate your pointing out the problem. But you're doing it in a way that you also ought to know will get us into deep trouble, I wonder ... Internally we will discuss and rectify the technical issue to be in compliance.

2. Other points you raised.

"Now that Blowing Wind is a Privately owned .org Domain."

BlowingWind the man started this in the late 90's at Yahoo/Geocities. 3 years ago he brought on board the current crop of moderators to help revive the forum.

The only thing changed RECENTLY is that it is the first time BW is having our own domain name ( www.blowingwind.org ). The issue of ownership never came out in the Mod's internal discussion. There was no change in ownership either if that is your point.

3.

will there be any transparency into how much personal funds or advertising revenues etc put into managing the domain + webhosting issues?

Since the move, the BW accounts is in deficit. The moderators are currently paying for the monthly upkeep at the moment.

Lungker (our mod) has pledged a personal donation to bootstrap us initially

We have received personal donations from several readers which we really appreciate.

For time and effort of the moderators, all of us are UNpaid volunteers. Several of us even have taken personal leave from work just to complete this forum migration.

You seem to know adsense well, you will also know the approx pay-off for a site like our. We are NOT deceiving ourselves that Adsense alone can be made to cover our cost (network, hosting, domain name, software, software-support etc) We just hope it will defray most of our yearly operational cost.

The mods are NOT saints with bottomless pit; if every few months, everyone has to open wallet to pay for hosting, I think it will be a dis-incentive to serve. Neither we want OralB / Gachi to constantly go around "begging" from our members. (They already go around appealing for lucky draw gifts for the BW parties)

No. We currently do not intend to appoint accountants and external auditors as our amounts are small. We leave it to the community to judge us and to help us defray the cost if they feel we are genuine and is a valuable community service.

4.

are there any future plans as to grow blowing wind into a portal and move on beyond just a forum?

If you have followed the chain of events in the last few months, you will have noticed that

a. We publicly discussed with the members on the future of BW

b. After taking the feedback, we have made a statement that this site will stay non-commercial.

As we are non-commercial, our resources are limited. Our acts currently revolve around moderating the forum and doing things that our members want but without the commercial-profit intention. Notice that our members have organised regular dinner, games and parties for members to interact.

- None of the members who organised events (eg Akated, Artemov, Buaya etc) are paid. Although the organisers do ask the people who attends to chip in to defray the cost of that event.

- None of the forum mods are paid either.

Sorry there is no road map if that is what you are asking for. Things happen when our members just step up to organise things. (eg Buaya's recent farm trip, bearbear's badminton)

5.

- who are the full time admin. can we have an "about us page" ie, a clear "if something goes wrong" who can we approach for specific matters etc...

Sorry to disappoint, there is NO full time or even part time admin.

The moderators are doing this out of passion (or should I say "too free"). We do whatever we can whenever our personal time permits.

You can see the list of Mods when you click on "BW Moderator" on the forum front page. OralB and Gachi actually regularly joins the guys for the dinner. Feel free to join the dinner and meet them.

If there are problems, feel free to post it the Feedback subforum. We see what we can do.

6. I hope this clarifies things.

Cheers!

Hendry Tan

Moderator

[bukitpanjang]

thanks guys.

apologies on the google adsense part.

anyway coming back.

- understandably u guys moved over the old board to another invision board, thus a typical license is well over USD $100

so the thing on my mind was

- is the choice of forum board based on ease of migration?

- did everyone factor in the possibility of using open source forum softwares instead?

- was the hosting used value for money? or a one size fits all kind of solution?

all the more i applaud the move to a privately owned .org domain (as opposed to being privately owned all this while... hehehe) i recalled some time back i think i had a private exchange with you (was it hendry???) with regards to shifting blowing wind to its own domain due to some outages with the free board etc, and hence seeing it happen now (for whatever reasons) is a positive sign.

what worries me is, for something that is "self owned" vs the free board we had been using

- the amount of technical knowledge required, ie, everyone will be strained to put in more volunteer time and effort

- the initial cost of setting up the software and hardware (ie choice of forum software and choice of webhosting)

it will come to a point when

- the current mods will be spending too much of their time on a forum they want to keep free (since everything comes under their own effort + knowledge) this might very well explain the need to spend $$$ on IPB boards as i believe they also give a certain amount of technical support?

- the cost will keep going up since every new post, new topic, new pvt message sent out to members, every flame war and every unnecessary posting made by guests to fuel unhappiness will amount to more bandwidth, more hosting space = bottomline increasing costs no matter how u look at it.

the other point to note.

- will users take it for granted?

as always in singapore, everything that is free is taken for granted. this will undoubtedly lead to the increase in costs etc, something like trevvy and fridae...

get as much community content coming in... get as many people to start using their services... and get as many people as possible to start using it on a daily basis to a point that it becomes part of their lives... thus in the end as commercial entities they get people to pay for their services (so far its just the personals and fridae perks etc)

of course that is a commercial entity.

so now, what if it comes to a point where the increase is exponential, and private funding + revenues from the existing sources can't keep up with the costs... will blowing wind die off? will there be sufficient users willing to support blowing wind when that time comes?

[IkuTube]

I appreciate your concern, bukitpanjang. Indeed, you've raised good points for us to ponder.

Just to add on:

- is the choice of forum board based on ease of migration?

- did everyone factor in the possibility of using open source forum softwares instead?

- was the hosting used value for money? or a one size fits all kind of solution?

Blowingwind has always been, and will be, a non commercial site for now. Though we mooted the plan for change, we actually had our members to decide. We did study, perhaps not extensively, on available options before deciding on this domain. We seek our members to understand our limitation; we had zilch fund to start with. Our earlier concern was to have a continuity from forumer, had the latest database and to carry on.

We are still hoping for technical users from our pool of members to come forward to assist us.

Fund/Revenue

- will there be any transparency into how much personal funds or advertising revenues etc put into managing the domain + webhosting issues?

We are very aware that we need to be transparent. BW Moderators, right from the onset of the move, agreed that it should be - that the books are free to be accessed amongst us. We have opened the Statement of Accounts. All to-date donations/contributions and expenses are entered and in order.

Perhaps, in the near future and when the books get bigger, we will need it to be audited. We definitely not expecting for a professional auditing but the accounts to be verified by concerned donors/contributors.

Personally, as the newest BW moderator, I must say that Lungker, HendryTan, Oralb and gachi are individuals of integrity. I have trust in all of them.

- the cost will keep going up since every new post, new topic, new pvt message sent out to members, every flame war and every unnecessary posting made by guests to fuel unhappiness will amount to more bandwidth, more hosting space = bottomline increasing costs no matter how u look at it.

You are, indeed, right, bukitpanjang.

We have thought of few ways to generate revenue. At the same, we are still hoping to get donations/contributions.

so now, what if it comes to a point where the increase is exponential, and private funding + revenues from the existing sources can't keep up with the costs... will blowing wind die off? will there be sufficient users willing to support blowing wind when that time comes?

Right now, we can only hope for the best.

Administration

- who are the full time admin. can we have an "about us page" ie, a clear "if something goes wrong" who can we approach for specific matters etc...

As often said, BW Moderators are doing 'our work' here out of passion. Therefore, it is utmost important that our members and guests adhere to the forum guidelines when they post. We hope members/guests take charge, be responsible and avoid "if something goes wrong".

- will users take it for granted?

We also hope they do not take us for granted to monitor every posts. Again, I must stress that the responsibility lies with our members/guests when they are posting. They should know where to draw the line and not thread outside our BW guidelines. This forum has to strike a win-win situation.

As it is, Blowingwind has become such a 'family' forum. Our members are increasing and there is now more interaction. The recent BW gathering saw more new faces and our chatroom has more users.

[HendryTan]

1. To be exact, the Invision IP Board software is US 149.99. After 6 months, there is a USD 25 maintainence charge.

2. Now why we chose the commercial forum software over other free open source version ?

a. The major consideration was to move all the 2K existing BW registered users and 68K BW articles across from Forumer into the new forum without much hiccup. We really didn't want to restart from scratch.

b. After we paid Forumer (our old host) for a backup copy of the database, the safest way to get all these data across was to use the "same" software. The vendor even offered "paid service" to help us migrate. Luckily we could do it ourselves. After the technical migration it was the tedious work for Ikutube to do the manual and hand transfer for the last 500+ articles or so. Overall, I think 99.5% of the articles made it across in one plus week of intensive effort.

Personally we could not spend "too much" time to explore the various options as there was demand from our day-time paying jobs. We just chose the path that seem most "risk-free", "affordable cost", does not take too much time and meet our objective in 2a.

c. The familiarity of the user interface for users and mods also made continuity much easier.

d. The commercial IP Board has a large community of people familiar with its customisation.

3. We are always concern about keeping the

a. Recurring cost : Low so as to keep the site maintainence cheap.

b. Technical Troubleshooting Issues : Low. We tried to restrict the amount of "customisation" so we can get help on the IP Board websites as our site is "standard". You notice our customisation is only to speedup the board.

4. The Mods did talk about risk of increased technical work-load that will result after BW "self-host". If not checked, this may lead to BW not able to continue. So far we are managing. Although we are trying to look for other ways to mitigate this risk as well.

Cheers !

[DirtyOldMan]

So I presume that all the men behind BW are actually friends and know each other in private and so on. That is good.

[IkuTube]

So I presume that all the men behind BW are actually friends and know each other in private and so on. That is good.

In order for the BW Moderators to work together - team effort - inevitably, we will get to know each other. Yes, friendship develops. It is the same scenario - when people work for any organization that camaraderie just takes place overtime.

[GachiMuchi]

Thanks BKPJ for your post.

We would appreciate posting and hopefully your generous contribution in the up-keeping of the BW Forum too.

[Lungker]

thanks guys.

so now, what if it comes to a point where the increase is exponential, and private funding + revenues from the existing sources can't keep up with the costs... will blowing wind die off? will there be sufficient users willing to support blowing wind when that time comes?

I am writing this from a kampong internet cafe (no cafe) where the maximum speed is 128 kps. Took me 5 minutes to load a page when the lines are busy. I AM NOT KIDDING!

BP, the costs will never be an issue if I am still around. We will never be a subscription site. You are others like minded people need not worry. You have my word on that.

In terms of technical expertise, you would be surprised what kind of experts we have on board. Hell, I am shocked myself. However, we have no intention to be a commercial entity - making ourselves look like Fridae, Trevvy or Sgboy. WE can but really we don't want to.

About the link to the ads portion of your initial post which Hendry deleted. Will appreciate your understanding not to pull that kind of stunt anymore. In future IF we feel that the intent was malicious, we will not hesitate to ban the nick and the IP address. Thank you for your kind understanding.

[bukitpanjang]

About the link to the ads portion of your initial post which Hendry deleted. Will appreciate your understanding not to pull that kind of stunt anymore. In future IF we feel that the intent was malicious, we will not hesitate to ban the nick and the IP address. Thank you for your kind understanding.

i assure u it wasn't a stunt but merely my typing too quick as i dun wan to lose my train of thought...

on the other hand

http://opensourcecms.com/index.php?option=...&Itemid=159

http://opensourcecms.com/index.php?option=...&Itemid=159

since it crossed my mind during the initial posts, i was looking at the 2 above and who knows if any of u are already looking into it already.

reason being is that for the smf forum, i've came across quite a number of large torrent based sites that are using it hehehehe and one of it is my fav "well known" torrent portal for "p"

http://www.forummatrix.org/compare/bbPress...Board+phpBB+SMF

having said that, the assurance that this site remains free for all for always is good... the fact that the effort and the $$$ does not come out from my own pocket leaves me little to fret about in the first place. above all, in the day of internet usage, like fridae and trevvy/sgboy, since i find them crap (load times issues, restricitve profiles etc), i still use them but i've used them less and less... hence if dun like it can just move on to something else. no one gets hurt.

by the way... is trevvy's forums still cluttered and... full of childish ppl? i've not ventured into it for a long time...

[Lungker]

You point taken and appreciated BP. Thanks.