What's this costing Josh? Are you looking to have ads, pay for memberships, stuff like that?
Growing the forum has always been a goal, I figure the best way to do that in the short term is to ensure that the forum remains a positive resource and meeting place for open discussion.
To be completely transparent, At first my goal is to recoup my own spending on the forum.
So far the bulk of the cost of getting the site online was the actual software that runs the forum, the hosting account, domain name, and I needed a little paid support from a colleague at work in the early stages. I have a paid backup system running too, in case anything ever happens. Malware is a big issue with "custom" (non sitebuilder) websites, so some protections in place there. Other costs have been minor, things like kijiji bump ups, minor paid tweaks to the forum, etc.
Some of these costs are annual, like hosting, domain, backups, etc. So while it's not a huge deal to have floated the cost (and I really did dive in on this myself), it's been looming over me a little bit that the forum will continue to have costs associated in future.
After that's caught up, I have a small laundry list of paid software add on's I think would benefit the forum, video gallery capability for example, Advanced polling, etc.
The forum software I picked is great, as it has a huge library of add ons, but many of them are paid components.
Additionally, I could see growing to include a couple of other components outside of the forum itself, like a library of sorts with user contributed articles on general topics, maybe a traditional website front end, etc.
I could picture working with
@Kris Jensen 's new store/bar in some way too? Who knows.
If one day we have a stream of steady members, I would like nothing more than to fund group projects, maybe cover the cost of production of some starter projects to nurse the hobby in beginners (not unlike
@Alexander 's steam engines), renting a venue for meetups (catering would be cool? haha), or a true pipe dream would be having a communal workshop, maybe a subsidized metal inventory?
--> Ideas like these are a long ways down the road though, if we ever get to that point, but I have high hopes and aspirations to help grow the forum, and the hobby in Canada in general.
If we had enough members, Canada revenue will get involved, if this takes off I could see registering as a non profit (which also costs a few hundred)? Though I haven't looked into this stuff yet, as it would be along way off!
Anyways, I hope that answers your question, but let me know if I missed anything!
Also, looking forward to everyone's thoughts!
JW
