These Forums Will Be Gone On June 1st

The donations have not gone to waste and yes we ran it at a loss for like 4 years but feel sorry for others Andy, wow you're the sympathic one. All the donations have gone to keep this place up and running.

 

Well, not that my opinion matters, but.. yeah. heck that. I'm not a fan.

 

It really sucks that it has come down to this, but it's understandable. Such a shame because it was a great board with the full vision.

 

What we are talking about is getting rid of the off topic forums that are just eating up space and not helping the site. We are talking about removing the Sportsbook. Then what we end up with is a Football forum with minimal off topic discussions. Want to talk football? Then we have organized forums for that. Want to talk about anything outside of football? There's a place for that too in the off topic forum.

Now....if the issue of member support doesn't change on the site then I will have to downscale the server and have to reinvent this site as a football news-only blog.

I am not here to get rich off the site. I simply want the site to pay for itself. We were not asking for much help from the members and unfortunately the help of a handful, while being extremely generous, was not enough.

 

Anyone who is upset.....first thing they can do is this.....ask yourself......did I click once a day every day? If the answer is no.....then you can either stop being upset or help out and click once a day. If the answer is yes....then I am in the same boat as you are, completely pissed off that it's had to come to this because so many are all take and no give.

 

Sweets, I couldn't have stressed enough that I understood SRW's position about the money issues, I just wanted to make a shout out for the other members that had invested their money in the site, because after all, they didn't have to do that.

 

Andy of course they didn't "have" to, and as we have said over and over and over again the donations of our members have been quite generous to say the least but the complaining from some who haven't donated or even clicked once a day should stop because they have no right to an opinion on this at all.

 

I agree, and in my first post I've actually supported the downgrading because no matter what you do, the majority will always ignore the fact that running a site of this size ain't cheap.

I'm not the enemy here Sweets.

 

:qft:

 

You're a Ram fan Andy, of course you are the enemy.:lmao:

 

I'm a clicker though, so you could at least consider me neutral :ariba:

 

For once I'm not being a rod....just trying to understand this? So tell me if I have it straight please. By site users clicking something somewhere once a day gets you ad revenue? You hoped enough users would do so to offset your costs for server fees and that didn't happen so your downsizing site features so server fees can be more affordable....is that the sum of it? Football thread will be unchanged but non football stuff is either gone or greatly cut down? You will still want users to "click" to help offset these more affordable fees?

 

Correct.

Correct. We are minimizing what we have on the site and will begin shopping for a cheaper hosting package.

Correct.

While it would help and if enough people helped once a day every day then none of this would be happening, I can't expect the members as a whole to help at this point. That has been a failure for 5+ years here and it's led to a scaling back of the site.

It's more than just clicks too though.....the members didn't step up to help the site in numerous ways. When we needed moderators or NFL reporters, hardly anyone stepped up. Then the majority of those that did step up ended up either stepping down or being removed from the staff for not helping.

 

Any thought given to having/allowing team specific reporters? I think a few people would be interested in posting articles if they only had to do their team.
Also, I check my phone usage every time the Sprint ad comes up, I've seen the national underclassmen combine application a ton, and I almost joined some church once. Just pointing out that I have clicked so I can offer the following opinions:
Rep system was great (I know we've had this discussion). A lot of times I have nothing to add to the converstation, so i don't want to add a post, but I'd like to let someone know they had a good post. And it's always nice to get that in return. Is it possible to keep a rep button w/o actually tracking the numbers? Would that lessen the drain?

Post whoring is stupid and seems like it would be the biggest drain, but I don't know how the finances all work out. Maybe getting rid of post counts helps that go away.

I liked the discussions on the Crossfire forum also. Of course I'm a dirty liberal, so I think Omen and smeagle should subsidize my GIF support with their tax dollars. :icon_cheesygrin:

 

We would need 32 people at that point to post news. We can't get more than 3-4 people to help out consistently, with 1-3 of those sharing the bulk of the burden. The idea is great but I just know it would fall flat on it's face.

Thank you for supporting the site. Too bad so many others couldn't follow your example on a day in and day out basis.

The only reason the rep system is off is because if we do end up leaving vBulletin then we won't have it anyway. Might as well start getting people used to not having it around.

We have done that already as of last night: http://gridironfans.com/forums/site-news/130879-post-counts-reputation-system-r-i-p.html

You will still be able to have Crossfire discussions, just not in it's own forum. The off topic forum will be there.

 

well, i don't know how much it costs to run the site the way it is but cubestat and websiteoutlook say GIF is generating about $500-$600/mo. in daily ad revenue. Simple economics say that if you are spending more than youre bringing in, you have to figure out ways to cut costs. I'm not going to complain in any way if a site owner needs to cut back to at least break even.

 

In an ideal world we'd be making $500-600 bucks a month, would have all the features and forums we have and have lost, we'd be able to afford custom work to improve the site and hell.....fund great monthy prizes for contests.

Unfortunately that's not the case.

 

well, i'm not a website expert or anything but i am a capitalist pig. are we doing everything we can to take advantage of the popularity of the site and the heavy traffic? cubestat and websiteoutlook rank your site as follows, which seems pretty damn good if you ask me:

Traffic Rank 184350
PageRank 3
Backlinks 2533
Dmoz Categories 1.Top/Sports/Football/American/NFL/Chats_and_Forums
Daily Pageview 5966

are advertisers just not paying anything anymore? have they given up on the internet?

** Edit: I checked a football forum website that I used to frequent that died a while back. They have barely any traffic at all but they still somehow have the same amount of vbulletin forums, etc. they used to have when they were busy and, in fact, just recently updated to 4.0.2. Their daily pageviews are only 20% of GIF's but their backlinks are 46,000. i'm not sure if they have figured out different ways to generate revenue and that's what is keeping them afloat or maybe they have one big private donator that's keeping them afloat but I thought I would just throw this out there........

 

Word. I didn't mean switching to an entire team based reporting system. I was just thinking of it as a supplement to lighten the load on the reporters.

Yeah, I understand this too. Gotta say I like the sound of that if though.

Saw that also. I was just thinking that 20,000 post worthless threads would be more of a drain on the system than the rep system, etc. I just don't know what costs what amount of money/ whats a drain and what's not.

Cool. I usually search by new posts anyway and go by the thread title. Which forum its in doesn't matter really at all. So overall, it might not be that big of a change.

 

Wait, if it's going to be a football blog as such and without vBulletin (or any other forum system), how is off-topic remaining?

If off-topic is staying, then hell, there's not really a huge change tbh.