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The Future Of Otib

Jay

By Jay
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Dolman Block B

Dolman Block B

Posted
Posted

Suggest a way to pay for it then, its not selling out at all, the Supporters Trust took it on so it was a fans forum run by the fans. :doh:

Dolly please explain, or have i missed something?

Are the ST saying it needs funds to carry on with OTIB?

Surely if yes, then a way of raising funding cant be that difficult, or are most on this thread saying they don't want to contribute?

How are other Forums funded :dunno:

Surely theres enough of us on here who will help ouy to keep it going, or am i totally off track with this comment?

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robins72

robins72

Posted
Posted

Dolly please explain, or have i missed something?

Are the ST saying it needs funds to carry on with OTIB?

Surely if yes, then a way of raising funding cant be that difficult, or are most on this thread saying they don't want to contribute?

How are other Forums funded :dunno:

Surely theres enough of us on here who will help ouy to keep it going, or am i totally off track with this comment?

As far as I'm aware the club paid for the site and let the trust have it for free for six months. After this period they will have to pay for the site. Otherwise it could be taken over by someone else. Advertsing is another way of paying for the running of the site. I'm sure the trust don't want to pay too much of their own funds to run otib if they can use the money for other uses that would be more significant for all the fans.

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Dollymarie

Dollymarie

Posted
Posted

The ST took over OTIB and in the process saved the club money who no longer have to pay its employees to moderate the forum. The ST now need to find a way to pay clik for hosting the forum etc. We do not want to take this money out of ST funds and so another way to raise the money for clik. We cannot discuss exact figures because its not fair on Cliks other clients to do this. The club agreed to carry on funding OTIB for the first six months. This time will shortly run out.

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Dolman Block B

Dolman Block B

Posted
Posted

The ST took over OTIB and in the process saved the club money who no longer have to pay its employees to moderate the forum. The ST now need to find a way to pay clik for hosting the forum etc. We do not want to take this money out of ST funds and so another way to raise the money for clik. We cannot discuss exact figures because its not fair on Cliks other clients to do this. The club agreed to carry on funding OTIB for the first six months. This time will shortly run out.

Well surley you will have to let people know how much you are trying to raise to fund this :dunno:

Cant possibly be loads of money :dunno:

Anyway, you mods surley now have to post a thread starting; WHO CAN HELP?

Thers loads on here who could possibly help although don't think its fair for those who don't want to pay to have to.

I'm up for it, and will def help you, but you lot best get the thing in motion now before its to late.

As far as I'm aware the club paid for the site and let the trust have it for free for six months. After this period they will have to pay for the site. Otherwise it could be taken over by someone else. Advertsing is another way of paying for the running of the site. I'm sure the trust don't want to pay too much of their own funds to run otib if they can use the money for other uses that would be more significant for all the fans.

When you say by someone else, who are you suggesting Lisa :dunno:

Who apart from BCFC fanatics would ever want to :dunno:

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robins72

robins72

Posted
Posted

Well surley you will have to let people know how much you are trying to raise to fund this :dunno:

Cant possibly be loads of money :dunno:

Anyway, you mods surley now have to post a thread starting; WHO CAN HELP?

Thers loads on here who could possibly help although don't think its fair for those who don't want to pay to have to.

I'm up for it, and will def help you, but you lot best get the thing in motion now before its to late.

When you say by someone else, who are you suggesting Lisa :dunno:

Who apart from BCFC fanatics would ever want to :dunno:

With the number of people that read the forum I'm sure any independent company would take over. I'm sure the trust would rather keep hold of it though with clik hosting the site. If it got too costly I'm sure that someone else would take the reigns of the forum over.

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Guest

Guest

Posted
Posted

With the number of people that read the forum I'm sure any independent company would take over. I'm sure the trust would rather keep hold of it though with clik hosting the site. If it got too costly I'm sure that someone else would take the reigns of the forum over.

As the hosts, we'd only really consider letting either the club run it or the SC/ST take it over. Obviously we are that point where the ST are trying to make it viable.

If we sold it, we'd not be selling the data as you get into many DPA issues with that, so it would be purely the name OTIB.co.uk that would be sold. I don't think we'd want to sell that either.

To put it bluntly, if the ST didn't make a success and the club don't want it. Well that would be it, it would be pulled. The time and effort it already amounts to each month doesn't really justify the costs it brings in anyway and its done more on a love of the club basis.

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Milo

Milo

Posted
Posted

OK, to justify the comment.

How much does this here board cost to run? Thats my first question...its probably been posted, but I cant be @ssed to go through the waffle to get it.

Why did BCFC dump the board on the ST?

Is this a common occurance, the club, not running the official forum?

What are the legal niceities involved? Are the ST frontmen( I don't know the right term for it) liable if owt dodgy gets posted, a l the players incidents last season?

Do do have to have insurance to cover this?

Are there any other potential minefields involved in running otib?

A suggestion, again probably already done. How about finding a sponsor for it? A computer software company/games company/one of the clubs official sponsor(s)...BTR would be ideal, with links to their business

Is this a runner?

If not why not?

From where I'm sitting, I reckon, you, the ST frontmen were dumped on. I don't think Mr Lansdown cared much for the criticism, during the poor run, or apparantly Mr Tinnion. This on top of all the other stuff, two companies, it does make you exceedingly cynical. and yes I'm prepared to back the ST, when my personal reservations have been removed. This is the one I have left.

Hi bucksred.

Ultimately running otib is consistent with our three main objectives related to representing fans views, community and helping the club financially.

We assessed the risks to the ST and had detailed discussions in Clik's offices, with the Club and with other Supporters Trusts who host internet forums. Providing the site remains as efficiently and excellently moderated as it is then the ST, Clik and posters should all be safe from litigation. No guarantees but we're comfortble with the risk.

In terms of 'dumping', we always had the choice to say no.

In fairness to Clik we have agreed not to say how much their costs are but the tecchies in the working group believe (and I intuitively sense) that they are very generous (see also Tom's post above this). That said the costs remain significant relative to the Supporters Trust's current monthly income so we need to find an alternative income source to cover it. The excellent comments in this thread give me every confidence that we'll get the revenue we need.

As someone mentioned earlier in this thread (I had a quick look back but couldn't find who said it - sorry!) the detachment from the official website has opened up an opportunity for City fans to generate revenue for the Club through on-line shopping / adverts that couldn't exist under the terms of the official contract.

I think the Club was unusual having such a well-populated forum linked to the main site. Many clubs have the official software from Premium TV and they are generally not well subscribed to. I'm not sure we can make comparisons with other clubs.

I think this was a 'win-win' for Club and supporters.

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Dolman Block B

Dolman Block B

Posted
Posted

As the hosts, we'd only really consider letting either the club run it or the SC/ST take it over. Obviously we are that point where the ST are trying to make it viable.

If we sold it, we'd not be selling the data as you get into many DPA issues with that, so it would be purely the name OTIB.co.uk that would be sold. I don't think we'd want to sell that either.

To put it bluntly, if the ST didn't make a success and the club don't want it. Well that would be it, it would be pulled. The time and effort it already amounts to each month doesn't really justify the costs it brings in anyway and its done more on a love of the club basis.

Tom have you informed the ST of the running costs or how much it would cost to take it over from CLIK?

Is it something you think they could afford to do, or is it time to call it a day?

How do other forums survive?

Surley companys or even individuals advertising on here should cover the costs or am i a million miles away from what it really needs?

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Dollymarie

Dollymarie

Posted
Posted

Tom have you informed the ST of the running costs or how much it would cost to take it over from CLIC?

Is it something you think they could afford to do, or is it time to call it a day?

The ST knows how much it costs per month for clik to host OTIB yes.

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Dolman Block B

Dolman Block B

Posted
Posted

Clik quite understandably don't want exact figures posted sorry ARNY

Fine, but why don't CLIK and the ST get together to work out a way of funding.

Its quite simple Dolly, either the fans want it or they don't.If their not willing to pay a very very small fee for something they all obviously love then its time to kiss it goodbye.

That would be a shame.

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Milo

Milo

Posted
Posted

Fine, but why don't CLIK and the ST get together to work out a way of funding.

Its quite simple Dolly, either the fans want it or they don't.If their not willing to pay a very very small fee for something they all obviously love then its time to kiss it goodbye.

That would be a shame.

Hi Arny, that's what this thread is all about. I'm confident we'll find sufficient funds through implementing some of the ideas here to cover the costs.

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bucksred

bucksred

Posted
Posted

Hi bucksred.

Ultimately running otib is consistent with our three main objectives related to representing fans views, community and helping the club financially.

We assessed the risks to the ST and had detailed discussions in Clik's offices, with the Club and with other Supporters Trusts who host internet forums. Providing the site remains as efficiently and excellently moderated as it is then the ST, Clik and posters should all be safe from litigation. No guarantees but we're comfortble with the risk.

In terms of 'dumping', we always had the choice to say no.

In fairness to Clik we have agreed not to say how much their costs are but the tecchies in the working group believe (and I intuitively sense) that they are very generous (see also Tom's post above this). That said the costs remain significant relative to the Supporters Trust's current monthly income so we need to find an alternative income source to cover it. The excellent comments in this thread give me every confidence that we'll get the revenue we need.

As someone mentioned earlier in this thread (I had a quick look back but couldn't find who said it - sorry!) the detachment from the official website has opened up an opportunity for City fans to generate revenue for the Club through on-line shopping / adverts that couldn't exist under the terms of the official contract.

I think the Club was unusual having such a well-populated forum linked to the main site. Many clubs have the official software from Premium TV and they are generally not well subscribed to. I'm not sure we can make comparisons with other clubs.

I think this was a 'win-win' for Club and supporters.

Thanks for the reply.

I'm satisfied with the answers. Are you going to have a rep on the trust to seek out sponsorship for any relevant parts of ST business? ie otib, either through links/shopping, or how City does wi players? Especially as this is pretty active by our league standards.

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Milo

Milo

Posted
Posted

Thanks for the reply.

I'm satisfied with the answers. Are you going to have a rep on the trust to seek out sponsorship for any relevant parts of ST business? ie otib, either through links/shopping, or how City does wi players? Especially as this is pretty active by our league standards.

After the AGM next week we'll have an elected Fund Raising Officer and a Treasurer who between them will make sure that costs are managed. However, lots of people will seek out sponsorship - the more people working on this the better as it is a labour intensive exercise.

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Dogbert

Dogbert

Posted
Posted

If you could get a bit more pagerank into the forum then people might be willing to pay for some very unobtrusive text links.

I put a link to otib from wikipedia back in 2004, the ST probably ought to get a link in there too. All that would help a little.

I'm inclined to think you should just go with AdSense ads if they make enough to pay, can be pretty variable on forums though in my experience.

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i_am_red

i_am_red

Posted
Posted

I can't see what is wrong advertising

but another idea is good old fashioned fund rasing, maybe if the club could donate a few things, possibly, the forum/st could auctoin it off (on ebay for example) or even do a raffle. Could even do a car wash with "volunteers" wearing skimpy clothes yay.

Or instead of having advertising or why not get one big firm to sponser it, a lot of people visit this site every day and with our 3000+ members (i think) maybe someone would be willing to cover the cost??

But i think advertising would be the most feasible ( i think thats a word)

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Nibor

Nibor

Posted
Posted

They give you that much bandwidth because they know that bandwidth isn't the bottleneck. If you just have standard web pages with a few images hosted you'd need to serve 100's of millions of pages to use all that, and if you tried it the web server they're running would curl up in a ball and die before it got anywhere near that load.

At a guess OTIB needs to run on a server capable of handling up to maybe 2 million pages a month and 500 concurrent sessions. It also requires running a commercial database that can handle 10+ queries per page served (look in the bottom right corner). It needs storage in that database for the half a million posts, and it needs backing up. Then there's licenses for Invision and the database too which would likely be over 4 figures annually.

The amounts discussed earlier in this thread are on the low side of what most commercial hosts would charge for the above in my experience.

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gazareth

gazareth

Posted
Posted

I have a fairly substantial network of sites on my hosting and together they use around 40gb a month. There's approximately 1 hour of downtime per month which is an excellent trade-off considering the price, the bandwidth allowance and the amount of diskspace (60gb).

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Milo

Milo

Posted
Posted

I have to add that we also get a great deal of support from Clik!

Agreed. Apply the percentage of Tom's day spent working on this site against his salary, National Insurance contributions and other costs of employment (including the Earl Grey tea bags) and it adds up.

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bucksred

bucksred

Posted
Posted

Can I be the first to advertise please?

BRISTOL ROVERS FC, SEASON TICKETS AT SPECIALLY DISCOUNTED RATES FOR SHEEEEEEED CONVERTS. PM ME FOR FULL DETAILS

Prepare to repel boarders!! Avast there Bluebeard :laugh:

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