Originally posted by LOGiSTiCs
whats ur daily bandwith for the forum? dont think the forum uses as much as some popular sites, maybe ur just with one expensive web host!
I think the whole donating thing is a good idea but the way your going about it seems a tad desperate!
$25 for a @esforce.com email, is this pop3 and smtp account or is it a simple FWD email address? an ftp account for sig and pics. Not sure if people can upload sigs to the forum or not but for that price u could buy a whole years web hosting for that to host pics on etc.
Contact team members via icq, msn etc? Whats the point, most peopel do anyway, there details are on the forum AND isnt a forum for communicating or forming a community?
Maybe just asking members to donate what they can if they want to help pay for hosting fees of the forum and maybe push the esf team into updatign and adding more features.
I dont tihnk the forum takes up that much bandwith at all and its EASILY coverable with there being so many of you in a team for a year!I was checking out some basic facts of how the bandiwth could be so high and its probably because of some of the sigs you mods use! I had EXACTLY the same problem with my forum which has Members: 41,347 | Threads: 81,613 | Posts: 547,708. and its down the the sigs which are stored ON server. Because so many members are visiting the forum and who havent downloaded the sig already, they are gonna redownload it. Depending on your browser settings you might not store that sig in cache so will download itevery time u see the sig in a post or thread. So you might have ur sig downloaded 60+ times by the same person on different threads.
Apart from that other people who host on their own space wont effect forum speed. Just page load times but that is down to the client not server.