Ever wonder why you don't see any ad banners flashing and blasting your eyeballs with their distractions all over this site?

Well, I hate ad banners. But I also hate putting up my own hard earned cash to run a web site like this one. I'm a bit of a tightwad. OK, a huge tightwad. Anyway...

A few years ago, I realized I had 2 problems.

1. Members were not required to make any real effort to join the site, and as a result they placed no value on their memberships. No effort, no accountability. No fun to run. Troll town.

2. The thing was getting very expensive. I had to buy a new server to support all the traffic, and pay for a higher bandwidth connection to keep it snappy especially for the modem users.

So faced with the problem of many many users running amok and making things miserable for everyone else, I came up with the following scheme for fixing both problems. People who care enough to send us something through the post are likely to care enough about their account to be a positive contributor to the community.

I didn't want to require anyone to have to pay money since many users are in rough times, but for most folks it's not too hard to toss a fiver in the envelope to donate to the site.

With the growth of my business endeavors, I was later able to accept credit cards which makes things much more convenient for those who want to donate some cash directly.

Years later, it is working great. We have enough money coming in to keep bills paid and hardware up to date, and nearly every single member of the site who wants to participate can do so with minimal interference from trolls and general riff raff. Except for me of course. =)

Regards
Matt