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I can write the signature below every comment instead, like this.
Proud member of Team push-ups.
Hammer the cores and blast the ports with no mercy.
No worries Ravi, that's not going to happen.
Hi Everyone,
We continue to listen and make adjustments based on feedback from our community and hosting company userbase.
As suggested by @DP today, we are going to offer quarterly payment option for the Provider Tag fee to help reduce the impact the new fee model may have on certain providers. We have already updated the initial post with details about this new option.
Thank you to everyone for their ideas and suggestions and thank you to our provider base.
@ravi the comparison between this forum and WHT is not valid. In WHT you can post ads without having a provider tag or paying a subscription.
the WHT project is completly fail in my eyes, pointless even to use WHT with their odd strategy and forum rules. I am wondering with amount of banners on lowendtalk, how come is not profitable?
P.S. I like Xmas and BF sale ads on lowendtalk even its already March (example: Hostsailor Xmas Sale with up to 65% off)
I'm leaving. I don't see "offers" and "ads" as the same thing, and this is a major disconnect for me.
I know that the two are similar, but no reasonable person would intentionally visit a list of "ads". Having to pay to make offers will fundamentally change their nature. I do not support this.
How does whether a provider is supporting the platform they benefit from change, fundamentally, the nature of their offer to end users?
I like to think of it as scam insurance.
I understand and know, not easy to 'operate' a platform like this (work, money, time, responsibility..). And the owner(s) - after the CC's time - want something for their work.. It's partly acceptable. This world chosen a way which is want to make "profit" from everything (and a lot of good community stuff dead in the last era on the internet because of this attitude).
I'm not sure, this is a good way for LET.
I like this Community and truly, the cheap budget VPS offers. I'm worry, because there is many "small" provider who work hard and provide very budget and good quality products (for example Gullo's Hosting / I have three 'NAT VM' from Them), and probably make very tiny profit with these. And with the "provider membership fee' this offers probably will be completely unsustainable in the future for most of 'budget providers'. And the Community Members who seeking this offers (like me) not sure to want/will pay more for the offers, services (because of the 'extra 'advertisements' fees'). And there is alternatives..
Combination of things such as the enhancements (ability to advertise in request threads, and mega threads) made to "Host Reps" and the ability to pay the "Provider Tag" fee quarterly (and with the initial discount) should whatever option the smallest providers in our community select workable.
Because paying to place an ad is different from posting an offer to a community. LET isn't an AD farm. There's a difference.
Paying for access to us makes us marks. It completely changes the dynamic. Providers can't post here unless they're getting enough value from us to justify this price. I don't like that.
The fact that I don't want any of the things you promised to spend the money on doesn't help either. To me this isn't so much "supporting the platform" as it is granting you a return on your personal investment. I think this is fine, honestly. I just think you could do it without tarnishing what's here.
Certainly don't want to tarnish anything. But I do want to enable evolution and growth. And that takes resources.
It's a tough balancing act.
Going to do my very best, and the team is going to do their very best, to help create a positive outcome here.
I welcome your thoughts and suggestions. As you can see plenty of suggestions have already made their way into policy changes the past few days.
I'm holding off. We have pretty solid shared hosting that I created a thread for, $50 for two years of a very capable plan, less than $2.10/mo. Not a single sale through LET. Granted the thread was rushed and not my standard, rare, but quality formatted offer thread, but nothing.
Figured I'd test the waters by offering something at a very steep discount over normal website pricing.
Unless you're selling at a loss and have a shill army I'm not seeing how it's worthwhile. Sure, $200 is nothing for marketing but for a small startup there are better places to invest that.
How many providers paid? Are we soon going to see the same 5 companies represented over and over on here moving forward?
You could charge to highlight posts on LET and for syndication on LEB instead. You could also create an affiliated low end marketplace where you take a cut.
Or you could do your plan but try to set clear guidelines such that providers can post particularly good deals without paying. That way you could avoid the trap of having only the highest margin deals on the site.
Well i've been hanging out here to grab dev boxes for cheap, if that is the end of it then i am out, i'm never buying from nerd cause he was involved in the scam back then. Already got what i wanted from Jar, so no point to hang out here if this forum is turning into corporate like WHT.
In addition, I have to say that the planned HR3s appear to have just the right amount of noise to be filtered out, defeating the purpose of organizing them. People new to LEB won't recognize them as offer posts, and thus ignore them for posts that prominently advertise one single provider.
But I guess that's the point; to lower visibility for those not paying the fee.
I doubt that will work as you are hoping for.
there will always be the "providers" who don't give a shit about rules or payment or whatever and post their offers and seo blabla anyway. would probably be interesting to see what happens, when they simply get an invoice after posting
- but most likely they simply will laugh and ignore it, they did not read the rules anyway right?
and then there might be possible scammers or summer host. those will rather gladly pay the now $50 or even $100 to directly get the tag without anymore hurdles in the way and even look more legit to start their scamming business.
TL;DR; no insurance rather fast lane access.
I see both sides of the argument, I'm just playing devil's advocate as per usual. I'd say a good indicator of the scam insurance theory would be the way boom reacts to this fee and whether he pays it.
As far as business is concerned, there's a strong case for the fee being a reasonable expense for marketing, considering the nature of this place, it's just like shooting fish in a barrel - a captive audience. If a business can't see that value, or would prefer to spend that money elsewhere, to each their own, but I don't think a serious business would take that path.
As far as the community is concerned, I guess we'll see if the price will deter scammers.
I'm curious how many have paid. Five? Ten?
So all this damage for $2k to $4k a year?
AFAICT four have publicly admitted to paying so far. Evidence is in this thread, and maybe you can comb through the provider-only private threads for more.
We have paid, we have seen a great up take in our shared hosting.
How can you measure this? Providers regardless of payment can still post offers and this is days old policy.
I mean in past posts. We have seen uptake. only time will tell if people stick around for deals.
Exactly that's the problem. So no more of some random Czech, Polish, Singaporean, Austrian etc ... hosts who came out of the blue and posted something awesome, just same old boring mostly North American hosting 24/7 spam all over and over again.
Variety, possibility to find some exotic location, to get some special one-time deal from not so common location always made this forum unique.
A lot of this declined already over last few years of ColoCrossing fucking with the forum, but this now puts just another nail in the coffin. And he's even pretending that he's doing it for us. What an asshole.
If i remember correctly from the tags cleanup a couple of weeks back(maybe in anticipation of the fee?) ...it got mentioned that there where around 250 provider tags removed. And around 300ish remained. assuming that its 2x 100 = 200 /year for the tag. And assuming that the real operational cost is in the 22k to 25k range... the required retention rate would be somewhere around 125 providers. So 1 in 3 providers. I have also not read if most of the ads will stay or not. So that'll be quite interesting to see.
There should be an active thread which lists all current providers on LET with the Provider Tag after the clean-up activity, and update/indicate which ones have already paid.
This whole saga reminds me of the days when @Ishaq got ousted for charging £20 for ad listings on LEB. Some things never change, but manifest themselves in different guises.
Change is sometimes good, and I know how hard you are trying to improve LowEndTalk, but I fear this change will have an opposite effect to the one you are hoping for, @jbiloh; however, it sounds like your decision is resolute, so only time will tell.
Having read this entire thread, this decision (or at least its implementation) is something I am wholeheartedly against, but I hope that it it works out the way you intend.
I strongly agree with this.
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/153227/let-provider-register-directory-find-your-next-host-here/p1
I think you're making jumps here mate that just doesn't make sense. Noone's prohibiting anyone from doing anything except post ads. If they don't want to post ads but still want to participate they can. This only changes the relationship of providers who submit offer posts then. However, again it's only localized to the "Offer" sections.
Regardless, the point here is that you've already been a mark. Why do you think RackNerds asks people to constantly bump their threads? You're the mark they want to advertise to. It's why I avoid RackNerds like the plague and have never purchased service from them (and never will). Why do providers submit offers to the forum? They want to get their name and their products in front of you frequent enough that next time you need a VPS you'll remember them and buy from them. With this new policy, those attempts now have an associated cost included. Nothing. Has. Changed.
Now this is a valid point of criticism. However, one could argue that instead that provider can then submit an offer through LEB and if it's interesting then the editorial team will hand-pick that provider due to their unique location, offer, experience, etc.
I think this is an idea that could have had better introduction and better PR, but I think the core idea is a good one. Either way, if the provider doesn't like it (or if it's not worth it for them) then they can cancel the contract. Time will tell how useful the offer is if you keep track of:
Basically, if it's only RackNerds and a few "larger" providers that keeps posting and paying for it, but the smaller providers stop paying for it, well you'll now know that it's not worth your money and time. LET will get less revenue and instead an alternative decision must be made. Or maybe one of you guys decides that you really got fed up by this and want to make your own site, then go for it.