Advert global announcement

I've been requested to add this back up as a global announcement but lock it to ensure that everyone is aware of it. I'm more than happy to do so...

As you can all see, 606v2 is growing day by day. And for that, we have you all to thank.

The effort and dedication that you have all put in to help this site grow has been nothing short of phenomenal. Every day I am surprised at how you all contribute in making this forum such a great place for us all to carry on the community spirit that was born on 606. And that is only part of the story. I can now see how we have outgrown our beginnings and are attracting new posters from outside our original home.

And I thank all of the new members for this too. Your continued contribution has helped us continue to flourish and become so much more than the original 606. Through the hard work of the moderation and admin teams, we have managed to get some incredible exclusives that were not possible under the BBC banner - interviews, competitions, special offers. These will continue to come and will get bigger and better the more the forum grows.

However, all of this has come at a price.

The original set up of this forum was facilitated by the use of free software. At the time of inception, this was the best and most cost effective solution for us all. And hopefully, you all really like the features of the forum. However, due to the incredible growth in our forum, the costs for housing us have risen dramatically (it’s now 10x what it started at). The owners of the software (forumotion) have to give us more server space, although they benefit from the fact that we generate more advert revenue for them.

The more hits the site gets, the more the forumotion gets from the ads. And it therefore costs us substantially more to remove them (to recompense them for their lost revenue). On top of this, forumotion also charge us more to retain the domain name. All in all, the costs have become much more than we had anticipated, and should the forum continue to grow as we plan, these costs will continue to grow too. So this leaves us with several choices.

1. We continue to pay for the ad removal out of our own pocket.
2. We leave the forumotion ads in place.
3. We introduce ads of our own.
4. We move to a new forum platform

So let me cover these off one by one.

1. The costs are now so great, it is not fair to ask the moderation and admin teams to continue to pay for these ever increasing costs. It’s not fair to ask members to contribute. The moderation and admin teams already give up their time for nothing and to ask them to pay to do this is unfair. For the founders, this is simply not an option.
2. We can leave the adverts in place and pay the domain cost from member contributions once a year.
3. The revenue generated by our own ads will pay for the domain name and removal of forumotion ads.
4. If we move to a new platform, we would lose the historical posts, the name (possibly) and a chunk of our membership possibly. We would also be faced with the same problem as now when we once again get to a certain size. It is merely delaying the problem unless we build our own software. This would cost us money to develop and we would still need to host any bespoke software.

So this means that the only viable option is to go with option 3 - the introduction of adverts that will pay for the domain name and removal of forumotion ads (so hopefully no misleading ‘you have 1 new message’ type). Any excess could potentially be used to advertise the site, as well as potentially paying for our own software to be developed.

So you will shortly be seeing adverts on the site. This is not being done through choice but as a means to better the forum and take away the burden from the members.

Hopefully you will continue to use 606v2 - we have some exciting developments ahead of us. We still aim to achieve our goal of being the best multisport forum in the UK (and beyond) and the addition of adverts will allow us to get there more quickly.

I would just like to finish with a final thank you. When I started this forum, I honestly thought it would be a nice little home for my friends I had made. But due to the work that you have all put in, I can now safely say that it has exceeded all my expectations. From thinking I would keep in contact with a dozen or so friends, I have nearly 3000. So I may not be the next Mark Zuckenberg but I can tell you that I consider you all to be my friends.

Hero