Hopefully tonight we plan to start running a few banner ads on the site. The ads are from very reputable companies who will be familiar names to many.
Its very much experimental this month to see how things go so please bear with us while we tweak things to get the balance and layouts right.
The site seems to have got quite popular in a very short period of time and has been funded by myself and Jake. A great many hours have gone in behind the scenes from various technical people. Last month the site attracted close to 300,000 visits and 3,000,000 page views. That translates to nearly 180 million files served, or billions since we started!
The site is completely independent and we have no intention of changing this. The hosting is still not a big deal financially, especially as we can do most of the work in house, but we are very keen to maintain the super quick and reliable site that you have become accustomed to. We will soon have a fully redundant server cluster in our London datacentre, as well as a 'hot failover' in the USA that we can switch to if things ever get really messy.
Our policy of minimal moderation only when absolutely legally necessary was a fundamental reason why this site was started. We have however come to learn however that legal defense and insurance is not cheap; we are now quite au fait at dealing with the solicitors letters that frequently land on our doorstep and have a framework to deal with them sensibly that maintains the free speech and independence we feel site like this need. The advertisers will have no 'priority' at all over normal members and we will certainly not be changing the way we moderate the forum to appease them.
Finally we have so many plans and ideas (as well as countless suggestions from members) for how we can improve TFF, we need to start investing in some rather big software projects to bring some of these ideas to reality. It would also be nice to be in a position to attend some of the Ag shows and provide members with some hospitality even maybe !
We decided early on that one of our fundamental principles is that the site should always be free for the members (and guests) to use. This is a principle that we will never revert on.
Hopefully the ads will allow us to generate a stream of revenue that will allow us to take the site through to the next level, making TFF an even more useful and interesting place to vist.
If anyone has any comments or thoughts about anything, ever, please just drop me a message. We hope to bring the first advertisers online later tonight if we can get the technical stuff working!
Its very much experimental this month to see how things go so please bear with us while we tweak things to get the balance and layouts right.
The site seems to have got quite popular in a very short period of time and has been funded by myself and Jake. A great many hours have gone in behind the scenes from various technical people. Last month the site attracted close to 300,000 visits and 3,000,000 page views. That translates to nearly 180 million files served, or billions since we started!
The site is completely independent and we have no intention of changing this. The hosting is still not a big deal financially, especially as we can do most of the work in house, but we are very keen to maintain the super quick and reliable site that you have become accustomed to. We will soon have a fully redundant server cluster in our London datacentre, as well as a 'hot failover' in the USA that we can switch to if things ever get really messy.
Our policy of minimal moderation only when absolutely legally necessary was a fundamental reason why this site was started. We have however come to learn however that legal defense and insurance is not cheap; we are now quite au fait at dealing with the solicitors letters that frequently land on our doorstep and have a framework to deal with them sensibly that maintains the free speech and independence we feel site like this need. The advertisers will have no 'priority' at all over normal members and we will certainly not be changing the way we moderate the forum to appease them.
Finally we have so many plans and ideas (as well as countless suggestions from members) for how we can improve TFF, we need to start investing in some rather big software projects to bring some of these ideas to reality. It would also be nice to be in a position to attend some of the Ag shows and provide members with some hospitality even maybe !
We decided early on that one of our fundamental principles is that the site should always be free for the members (and guests) to use. This is a principle that we will never revert on.
Hopefully the ads will allow us to generate a stream of revenue that will allow us to take the site through to the next level, making TFF an even more useful and interesting place to vist.
If anyone has any comments or thoughts about anything, ever, please just drop me a message. We hope to bring the first advertisers online later tonight if we can get the technical stuff working!
