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Should rename this site highendtalk.com, membership is more expensive than WHT
My predictions ~
RackNerd @dustinc paid the invoice within 6.66 seconds, beaten 99.9% of all the providers.
@VirMach spun the wheel and it says "pay the invoice".
He mailed cash with a VirMach-branded business card.
@FlorinMarian is deciding between paying $200 for a Provider Tag and buying another futon.
@Francisco decides not to pay because Karen won't approve a discount so that they don't have anything to offer.
Katie forwarded the invoice to management.
Management ignored the invoice because @Hetzner_OL brings value to LET, not the other way around.
@Cam knows everyone loves him and will continue to buy his NAT containers even if he doesn't post more offer threads.
He saves the $200 and passes the saving to existing users.
Boomer @ezeth hasn't noticed the invoice because he has 500 emails to answer and he can only answer 25 per day in his 2-hour working time.
@cociu received the invoice as well but he’ll need to sell some of his old hardware on olx first so that he’ll be able to pay as soon as he’s unbanned - if that’ll ever happen.
It's scheduled for Monday
looooool. i blame this on him actually, he openly mentioned $12,000 to invest, so yeah he deserves to pay $200.
due to their tight security i believe the gmail account invoice has failed fraud protection, requires investigation.
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL i wouldnt be surprised this makes him abandon LET support threads
Should I feel special that @yoursunny didn't mention me or should I feel sad that @yoursunny didn't mention me due to I am not worthy?
Anyways. We still haven't decided what we will do at the moment.
Message continues
The important question is: did They double the invoice in those 6.66 seconds?
I'm kind of waiting now for everything to be confirmed in policy to decide how I feel about the changes since these threads are getting rather long to keep up with and I will continue to watch the direction management takes and also keep an eye on it's effects.
I have an instinctive feeling that that even if many of you were to be offended enough to leave due to these changes, the nature of this forum itself by value will attract others to replace you. The community is not as powerful as you guys think you are vs the niche.
Just reflect deeply on what I am saying.
Correct. In fact this is why Biloh keeps loosening the registration rules and unbanning spammers and the like so that he can have an inflated user count.
These new users may not contribute meaningfully to the community, but it won't affect anything in the short term as low contribution users ask for double bandwidth, create PMS threads, and the like.
The biggest impact would be long term, as any societal construct (such as this forum, or at a larger scale, governments and corporations) are dependent on its most valuable members, where the notion of "value" is not as simple to measure as the people usually running the place often like to think.
(You can see Biloh falling for this trap by trying to please Nekki, although it's not about Nekki himself but he and his interactions with the community, which means that you need a certain kind of person on the other side of the equation who, along with Nekki, delivers value to the community.)
I don't really agree. I think there are far less actual active users on here than most people realize. And I think the fact @jbiloh can't cover bills based on the ad revenue suggests just how close it is to destabilzing. It seems many hosts are saying no, or waiting, users aren't happy - and what new host coming here for the first time is going to gamble $200/yr? It's much more likely a failure not yet actualized.
If only a few core users slowly leave, offers slowly vanish except for a few hosts due to predatory pricing, and some lackluster BF deals come out as all the hosts are now dumped in one thread... I don't think it takes all that much effort to destabilize a barely surviving forum. I'd ballpark that just 4 hosts, and 8 frequent users, is enough loss to kill off the forum. And we've already hit those numbers in this thread.
This has already changed the perception of the userbase for @jbiloh - that image issue will remain forever now. He will never be trusted again.
I'm pretty sure with him desperate for revenue, forgetting all the users, adding a subscription model, etc - he expects RackNerd or OVH to buy him out. He is blind to the fact if OVH sees this as even somewhat of a viable website, they will just dump money into it cloning it and controlling a better competitor platform.
With fewer hosts, fewer users, new hosts risk adverse, and broken trust with users - this initiative drops to a $0 value. I doubt it's financially recoverable now. User recoverable is at risk and TBD.
It’s sad to see this happen.. the LET community was something special and it was one of those websites where you close the tab and immediately reopen it. We won’t be subscribing as a provider here because of many reasons, not just because of the fees. I truly hope this community survives as there is nothing quite like it anywhere else.
Is there going to be a separate colocation offer discussion? I don't seem to find it yet?
Good, invoice paid.
Would a provider who has a copy of the contract be prepared to share it?
@jbiloh on the other hand you could just charge 200/yr to users who buy shit and instead of letting it expire they come here and fill the home page with useless transfer threads/posts, like if these were video cards or PS5 (when they were hard to find). You could probably cover all the operational cost of this alone... ok joke aside...
Now on topic, the only thing I like of this pay wall is that it would serve as a shield and separate the good from the bad providers. However the idea is pretty much a fail from the start since the "good" or decent providers (with the exception of big mammoths like interserver and the likes) , like we have seen in the thread, will not pay for the tag, just primarily because they either don't see it justified or because they are afraid to disappoint the members of the community that do not support the idea.
IMO a good option to funding is to give the user an option pay a sub, to support the community, not mandatory, with the only advantage of not showing ads to those users. If the user/community member appreciate the forum, they will probably buy the sub, just like they do with twitch, reddit, etc. This way you as the forum owner don't feel like is a charity, you are still giving a feature in exchange. Maybe complement it with a tag that says "supporter" or "premium" like the old blue forum. This fee could be $1/mo.
Leave the provider tag as is no changes and grant the paying providers (the $200/year) with a more noticeable tag. Letting the community members know "ok this providers supports this community, he is paying $200/yr.
In regards to the people whining about $200/yr not being justifiable, well social media (FB, Instagram, Google ads) ads cost way more and they could be less effective for the web hosting providers.
The amount of useless threads that is nowadays in the front page and the repetitive bumps of the same old players are more of a danger to this community than the $200/yr.
Then there are the very aggressive posters, who instead of saying "Hey Jon, is my opinion that this idea is bad and might turn off the community" , we get "Hey Jon, Fu** you you are a greedy blah blah and you will kill this community, blah blah", c'mon people where is the etiquette. Somebody has to cover the operational costs.
When we received the invoice as mention here already our initial response was to @jbiloh was no way... After a couple of days of digesting the news Coast Hosting will be paying for a 'Provider Tag' and continuing to offer competitive hosting deals in Australia. We will be posting some deals shortly so keep an eye out for those.
We are not a huge provider but we are growing steadily, LET community has been a great contributor to our business so this is a way we can say thank you!
@jbiloh
Sometimes providers provide good & cheap deals are here, that's why I'm here. But if the providers leave due to tag fees, I think there's no reason for me to stay.
Just change the fucking domain to middleendhosting.com
This was once a great forum for everything, but now you are just turning into WHT.
Many people came in here because WHT was becoming a toxic place that was mostly PAY & PAY & PAY for some results. Oh you don't want to pay then either fuck off or be thrown into the bottom....
I think some of yall are taking it too seriously.
It's a fundraising method to:
It's not really gate keeping imho nor is it a major issue. I don't think this was executed well (could have been better) and the method definitely needs work, but I think the core nugget is something that's needed. I think the goals itself are good and within reason for LEB/LET's success.
LEB/LET has pretty much been stagnant for years with a revolving door of users. It's gotten significantly better from the days when it was owned at ColoCrossing. Everyone on the team has seem to be doing what they can to build content and actually have a proper team who's doing real shit. However, for LEB/LET's survival they should be growing and this is another method for them to try and accelerate that growth.
If you think you can do better then just build your own web forum. It might be difficult for the smaller hosts but one can also argue that this requires at least some level of funding/success in order to access this section of the market. In addition, LEB offer posting is still available even to those who refuse to pay the fees, still giving you some form of access to the clientbase.
My opinion has always been that LET is significantly more valuable than LEB. I haven't read LEB in years. For me, this shows that the real gem is the LET community members.
Yes and no. The LET community can handle a fair amount of stress with members coming and leaving. But if there's a significant shock event there will be a massive change in users and where they go. This fee implementation is not a such event.
This forum may as well become
bbs.racknerd.com, which reflects the majority of traffic.https://notvirmach.com will launch another forum filled with @FrankZ bus photos.
I clicked the link and didn't know what I was expecting.
Fair enough.
Here is a new profile picture for everyone:
I hope you reconsider. There will be plenty of deals. And remember all companies, even those not supporting LET, can still have a Host Rep tag and still be featured on LowEndBox.
Thank you for your support, I appreciate it.
LowEndTalk is going to prosper. So much effort is going into our platform from our team members that we are going to make this work.
WE hope to have your support in the future.
Are you meaning a colocation only category? Probably not a bad idea I suppose?
I like user engagement in active sales threads. That said, we are going to look at establishing a policy to handle very old sales threads that get bumped.
Thank you for sharing your polite and thoughtful opinions.
I appreciate your etiquette!
Thank you for your support to our platform.
Really smart analysis. Thanks for the words.
As I shared with another user recently,
LEB and LET takes a TON of time to run and lots of money (I know many people don't believe that). The reason why we implemented a fee for providers, the ones among us who make all the money from LET -- and don't let them fool you, many are making boat loads of money -- is because I feel that the market is shifting. This isn't 2011, people can go to Digital Ocean or AWS / Lighthouse / Azzure / etc, and get a inexpensive VPS.
Our community needs to grow and it needs more and bigger funnels that drive people to LEB and LET. Someone hits LEB because of a content piece, and they join LET and vice versa. Yes, the past few years LET especially has grown quite a bit and I am proud of that, but I am not going to sit back now and stop our improvements.
In order for our pool of users to continue to grow and offer providers the opportunity to sell the users services, we need to stay relevant. To stay relevant we need content. Content isn't free (and that I am proud that we pay our content team very fairly). So it's a big picture sort of thing and when some very vocal LET users say "just go away and don't touch it" -- in my humble opinion that is actually dooming it to guaranteed failure in some period of time.
I thought we would get a colocation only category for offers? As well as for support services etc? @jbiloh
The people have spoken. Expect no more Bus photos to be posted by me.
No. I demand more.
How many more?
EDIT: removed bus photo
We may soon get new rule for normal users:
Pay for signature.
Looks like LET is on the way to WHT v2