Apologies for yesterday's downtime. This was a result of us reaching our monthly bandwidth allocation for November. There are two reasons for this:
1. The forum has become much more popular in the last few weeks (probably as a consequence of the Dallas Conference)
2. I had an issue with an IP range earlier in the month traced back to a educational consortium. The problem of schools web whacking sites linked to this forum seems to impact on us adversely.

It is gratifying that we are becoming more popular. There are however funding implications. The adverts on the site hardly bring in anything at all. I would welcome suggestions from members on how we could make the forum self financing.

Charge everyone's credit card 5 cents for every word they post?

Naah, given that I sometimes run on, we ought to come up with a better suggestion.

Andy, can you give us an idea how much money you need to "break even" with an expanded bandwidth?

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Andy, John, Tim, et al.:


The majority of the military associations of which I am a member, have an annual $20 fee. For instance MATCA, my Marine outfit, has about 500+ members. However: The online group has only about 100+ members, and it has 2 distinct "Lists". One is more of a "chatroom", and it disgorges an average of 30 e-mails daily. The VIP List [both are with Yahoogroups.com] is dedicated to articles, imbedded photos, website URLs, and small attachments.


We have onboard active duty Marines [some in OIF/OEF AORs]; But most are retired (both from the Marines and later government careers). Many who are "single tour" (3/4 year enlistments, 6 year officer commissions) -- and yet the "Annual Statement" shows a net bank balance of $30K/$40K without fail.


I firmly believe that a graduated membership fee for this Forum is in order. For instance, y'all might consider the use of either a "pro bono" attorney member's services (or a $300 lawyer fee) -- and this would give you a U.S. based "301© Not-for-Profit- Corporation". As such, this would permit even a measly $20 to be tax deductable.


[Better that this Forum, and a member benefits -- rather than Halliburton, Brown & Root, et al.]


Students might be put on a "Gratis" and/or "voluntary donation" membership -- which might range from $1 to $5 per annum.


Authors, members of the media, academe, et al.: might be encouraged to "donate" amounts above the basic $20 per annum fee.


I am on a restricted budget, but by avoiding most "high calorie" software, clothing, entertainment, food, etc.
during the year -- I am comfortable making exactly what I earned as an Ironworker during 1963 thru 1973
[mostly part-time/seasonal work]. Moreover, and since the Dept. of Veterans Affairs covers all of my "Meds" & e"Equipment" costs; I am real "Comfy"!!


A "surcharge" for "Trolls" and "Agent Provocateurs" (but, only those who have "Fessed Up" naturally) would be more than equitable. Moreover, for those who are too "Politically Correct", or fail to "Vent" in accord with most "normal" human (Homo Sapeins, Erectus, Australis, et al.) practices, i.e.: via the nsertion of a reasonable amount of "Potty Mouth" expletives -- moderate "FINES" might be imposed against said PCers !!


Respectfully [my fingers cramped up on that word] Submitted,

Gerry Patrick Hemming

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Perhaps we could get one of the regional broadband consortia to be a sponsor. They have a mission to provide services and content to English schools.

That's an interesting idea Andrew. However both John and I are very keen to maintain the independence of the Forum. Organisational involvement can lead to unwanted interference with what is being posted and published.
John (through Spartacus) has offered to fund an upgrade of the Forum which is a very good solution as far as I am concerned. I am also assured by John that I will still be allowed to criticise the strange ideas he has about football and other things despite this development
Ideally however I would like the Forum to fund itself through the adverts we display. I am puzzled why content based ads perform so badly on a forum when the same ads perform very well on websites????

[quote name='Andy Walker' date='Dec 3 2005, 04:06 PM' post='47133']
[quote post='47132' date='Dec 3 2005, 03:55 PM' name='Andrew Moore']
Perhaps we could get one of the regional broadband consortia to be a sponsor. They have a mission to provide services and content to English schools.
[/quote]

Andy,

I would think that any kind of pay to play, read or post would not be good.

Besides ads, and educational sponsors, I would suggest that a philanthropic non profit, tax deductable foundation that supports edication projects would fit the bill.

Bill Kelly

Rest assured this forum will always remain free to the end user

What amount of bandwidth does the forum use in one month?

20-25 GB

I am happy to provide 30GB Bandwidth per month/1GB Disk Space to host the Education Forum. It will come with a whole load of other features, email accounts and so on.

PM me if you want more details!

Thanks for the offer. I'll raise it with John

for some reason some of the issues of, I think, a couple of upgrades past seem to be back. double posts, posts not registering.

I haven't seen any evidence of what you describe John - could you provide some for me to look into to? Double posting can often be put down to connectivity problems. Posts not registering is potentially more troubling.

Firstly I'm possibly not using the word 'registering' in the same way you mean Adam. I'll explain how I mean.

I was reading the topic on military dictatorships and noticed that while my name was 'registered' as the last poster, Terry had added a post. This apparently had not 'bumped' the topic nor 'registered' as last poster. I added a post and it also appeared to not first appear, not to 'bump' the topic.

The page that came up was one of those standard browser error messages recomending trying later or reloading.

I reloaded the 'dictatorship' page 2 and found that the post had 'taken' but the main page had not recorded a new post. In other words, the post 2 previoulsly was still 'registered'as the last post, even though two posts had been added.

So to correct this I reposted, and this time a page 3 was added, the topic 'bumped, so it was OK. I deleted the previous to last post and it's now as you see.

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This was happening a fair bit some time ago and seemed to be corrected by a particular 'upgrade'(?)

As a result I developed a habit of always copying the post before submitting so just in case I could easily repost, I added a comment on how this 'workaround' in my bio note below. It seemd to become superflous so I removed it recently.

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anyway, thats a bit of background.

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I am currently working on very large files which absorb quite a lot of memory, real and virtual, so it may have to do with some connctivity issues, however the speed at which the 'faults' appeared seemed to not be particularly different from otherwise when things work well.

Hope that is of some help in working out what, if and where the 'problem' lies.

I am having problems with my main website www.educationforum.co.uk this morning which will have some impact on the look and speed of the forum - apologies for the inconvenience

Andy, It took about 8 tries to post a reply here (#) just now, is there any particular reason why this might have happened? I had a similar problem there a couple of days ago, but it took just one extra try to work.

# http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...pic=4719&st=105

Is it possible for this sort of thing to happen for particular topics, or is it a temporary Forum thing?

(edit:: this post was no problem.)

Further edit::: I am inclined to suspect that it's a bandwidth issue.


The current emoticon symbols interfere with lists and bullets Letters in parenthesis etc bercome ridiculous irrelevant icons.