This may be a bit presumptions, or maybe i'm taking things a bit too far by making this post, but what i want to make clear is that i very much like this site, and think where it is at is a good thing. However based on jbadams recent post, it seems that their may be a potential long term budget problem with supporting this site?

If this is true, i'd like to try to generate a discussion on what can be done to help this site, that doesn't resort to the site becoming reliant on tons of ads, and will hopefully benefit users in the long term. my first suggestion would be to look at the system something like reddit uses:

Gold is something that users can buy, and give to other users that gives them temporary additional features. GD.net already has GD.net+, I would say it might be beneficially to add a similar system here, where users can give posts(note i think this is a key component of the reddit model's success, as other users can see exactly what posts were given gold and how many times), and that user gains additional GD.net+ feature time. secondly reddit also displays the daily progress to support the site, which in my opinion reminds users who do have additional cash to support the site, can always know where the site is in it's requirements).

This is of course one suggestion, and I think there are other ways that the site can benefit without worsing the user's experience. I truly hope i'm not over stepping my bounds on this post, and admins are fine with having an open discussion on the financial situation of this site.

it seems that their may be a potential long term budget problem with supporting this site?

I don't think we made any secret of the fact that we really needed that survey we ran earlier in the year to go well. Thankfully the community really rallied to it and it did go well, so between that and some cost cutting the site is fine for now.

As I alluded to in the other topic you referenced however, I would really prefer that we were better than "fine for now"; ideally it should never get to a point where we really need one particular thing to go well to keep the site running, and in a perfect world we would have a budget for making improvements to the site -- even if it's just being able to pay to have a single developer dedicating part time hours rather than everything being done in spare time.

my first suggestion would be to look at the system something like reddit uses:

Mike actually came up with something like this a while back, so it's good to see others also think it may be a good idea. Hopefully it's something he can get implemented at some point that might help out.

Personally I think our GDNet+ offering has always been a little half-hearted with "most ads" removed, and would probably be a lot more attractive if it gave the option of removing all ads -- probably with an opt-in setting to allow people to voluntarily still see the community-contributed ads we're currently running in the header slot.

As something that's been a really popular request I'd also love to see a black theme on offer as part of GDNet+, but properly themeing Invision -- especially with the sheer number of pages that make up our site -- is as painful as doing most other things to Invision, which as you might be gathering is distinctly non-trivial.

How about making the whole website more data efficient ?

This page takes up 3.8MB of bandwidth ( according to my debugger ).

3.8MB may not be much for one person, but just think how much bandwidth is being used by the thousands of visitors the site gets every day.

Also, I noted this page spits out a lot of inefficient auto-generated JS that looks bad, bloats the page, and runs like crap.

I tried to sign up for the yearly subscription and it told me I wasn't allowed to do that.

Why?

How about making the whole website more data efficient ?

I tried to sign up for the yearly subscription and it told me I wasn't allowed to do that.

Looking in to it is now on my to-do list, but I may not get to it till tomorrow.

Thank you, sir.

I wonder what could GD.net add that's valuable yet cheap (to add) but also would produce a profit?

Tutorials????

I wonder what could GD.net add that's valuable yet cheap (to add) but also would produce a profit?

Tutorials????

.

An official list of categorized resource links would be great addition also.