Thank you all so far for the comments.
- Just to restate, the costs need to be covered, yes, but that is not the most pressing at this time, since I've paid for them myself mostly the past two decades (though we did get more donations in the far past, so it could be done from those). Perhaps a Patreon may be a solution there.
- I very much doubt that the Discord channel is impacting the forum a lot, since the number of posts per month have been stable the past years.
- The number of new user registrations per year keeps growing, but that is because attachments to posts can only be downloaded by registered users.
The biggest problem is the cost of time. Time costs a lot of money and energy. That cost is not reimbursed.
Some responses and answers:
I hink this forum could use heavier moderation. Clean up the useless threads, set proper rules for help/request, give the releases more attention!
That sounds like a job. Who wants to do the job? Any volunteers?
Here is my proposal... deleted the discord server, or just lock all the rooms and archived the server, this will make people start to post here more for information instead of discord. This is non-negotiable, either do what I am proposing or we will just move to a more competent site.
Wow. Rude. Get off your high horse there, partner.
What are the costs of keeping the forum going?
If its say $100-200 a year for example, i think a few of us could provide some support without a problem
As said, costs is not the biggest issue, but there is also no room with the current hosting to offer any downloads as a site, the number of emails send through the site is capped, and yes, people forget the cost of time. Time to do proper site maintenance. Not included in the package, so I have to do these things myself. Keeping code up to date is the least I still do, barely, but to expand the site and implement new features? Look at the wiki.xentax.com. Good luck implementing the new Mediawiki code. No time. You need true webmasters for that. I could outsource it, but that will increase costs significantly. And I still would need to provide oversight. Time.
i personally know nothing about how to run a forum/website in general and its costs, there for, more info needs to be provided.
There's a lot you can leave to a host, but you need to know SQL, PHP and HTML at minimum, and general knowledge about webservers.
Then you must be able to update code for the different websites, like phpBB for this forum, Wordpress for the main page, Joomla for another, Mediawiki for the Wiki. You need to be able to update to the latest php, and fix compatibility issues when thing go wrong. You build the websites yourself, build the correct tables, upload the code, test the code offline, any new feature you implement yourself or use extensions, that fuck up your code due to crap backward compatibility etc. So yeah, you can throw a host a bone to make sure basic stuff is in order, like security, bandwidth and emails, but the bulk of the cost is time and dedication.
And then I haven't talked about site moderation and writing. That requires time on the hands of our wonderful moderators, that also do this in their spare time, since no-one is paid here.
Perhaps the problem is more clear with the info I provide.