War of the Ring Subscription has officially launched!!

[Illuvatar]

Well folks,

As promised we are now offering a subscription program!

So what is subscription all about? Well it is a way for you to support War of the Ring and the sites we host. We figure it is a bit like buying a magazine each month. Like buying a magazine, as opposed to reading it off the shelf, you get some additional benefits when you subscribe. So although you are donating to help the site you will also receive as many goodies as we can muster!

You can check out the details and sign up here (http://www.warofthering.net/subscribers/subscription.shtml).

Benefits include a Photos Forum and Exclusive Competitions only avialalbe to subscribers. With the Photo Forum anyone can register. They can comment and send e-cards, though only subscribers can upload images. You can check it out here (http://www.warofthering.net/pp321/index.php).

Please remember folks that it is voluntary and those who do not sign up will not lose any access or function on the site. Though those who do will gain some additional benefits.

Coming soon is a subscribers homepage even!.

For all of our Community members that have been itching for a custom avatar and title without bing staff or nominated as Member of the Month, well.....your day has arrived! For you, the additional benefits are:
A custom Avatar of their choice
A custom title of their choice
An additional avatar showing their status as subscribers and supporters of the site.

We thank you for your support. And as always, your feedback is also appreciated!

In Fellowship,

War of the Ring Team

[Mocha]

Sounds lovely :grin: :grin: :grin:

[YayBoromir!]

Another great idea! :thumbs: I never realised how much the site cost to run! Hopefully this will make it easier for you! :grin:

[Illuvatar]

Hey Everyone!

Thanks for all the feedback and support so far.

Due to the feedback in regards to online VS offline payments, we've now setup the program to handle offline payments! :whoohoo:

The Silver Subscriber sign up page now includes an option selection bit where you can specify as to whether your payments will be mad eonline or off, and the subsequent payment page now contains options for monthly or annual payments as well as the offline payment instructions (money order, address to send to, etc.)

Thanks for helping us get this off the ground proper! :thumbs:

[Alatar]

Will there be other packages introduced later on?

[Illuvatar]

Good question!

We had originally designed this for Silver, Gold, and Mithril, ($5, 10, 15), however managing 3 seperate plans with additional goodies to manage for each plan, seemed to be a bit difficult at the time.

We may however be releasing a second tier, which would be Gold, in the future, if managing just the Silver benefits turns out to be successful and easy enough to manage.

[Alatar]

ok then it all sounds good to me:)

well done on getting it set up man:thumbs:

[Bonos-Girl]

silver subscripion sounds so good i can't actually think of anything that you could put in a gold tier! lol

[Illuvatar]

Well......that's why we do the thinking! lol j/k

No, what I'm thinking about for the gold tier is maybe a blah@warofthering email addy, either as a redirect or an actual functioning mailbox.

I think that would be easy enough to manage and be worth the extra 5 bucks.......

Your thoughts?

[Fatty]

Well if we did lanuch a scond teir it would probably also have additional space on the photo forum....I think. But we need to get some silver subscribers first! :-)

[Alatar]

I think that the email option is a great idea, especialy if it let you do functions that some of the free email accounts wouldn't (hotmail, yahoo etc).

And you said somthing before about there own webpage?? that would be very nice, but say everyone got one and made it really big, wouldn't that put even more pressure on your resources??

[Illuvatar]

Yes, exactly Alatar, that's why it will more than likely be just a re-direct option, where mail recieved at blah@warofthering.net would be forwarded to your actual email account.

As you say we do have to take site resources in to consideration and we must keep up the performance and keep you peeps happy! :p

[Alatar]

Dam straightlol but na i like the email idea.

It would proberly up the amount of visits from the suscriber, as previously they might of only come on to the net to cheak email with say hotmail. With there email being able to be cheaked here they would proberly make this there first destination:thumbs:

[Fatty]

Ah hmm good thinking Alatar, maybe we might even add this to the silver subsciption, as although we have had a few peeps subscribing, still 95% short. THough only be open a day or so.

With email a redirect just goes to your own email so Fatty@waroftheirng.net goes to my real email. However, we can also make online email accounts ala hotmail etc, with all the features. The effect on resourses would be minimal unless we had a few thousand and then of course it would not be a problem. Though Illu is correct it would have an impact of sorts, though not on this sites performance...

With sites, that is one for another tier. Though we could easily host about 600 or so small sites.....

We will see, thanks for the efeedback,

[Alatar]

no problem mate:thumbs:

[Fatty]

Incidently ALatar, what restriction specifically are you talking about with hotmail etc, just so I can get something that gives the features people do not get with those.

Thanks

[Alatar]

hmmm well Hotmail doesn't really allow any form of codeing to be used in it's emails, It's use of images in emails can sometimes be confuseing, It has very small storage space for users so often emails can't be sent to them becuase account has used all storage space, small attachment size. i think that is it:) hope it helped

[Bonos-Girl]

but hotmail is like the worst free email, you should compare what finctions yours could have with yahoo (it has twice the space as hotmail and waaay better spam filters...as in you don't get over 50 'dodgy' spam emails a day....)

i thinnk that maybe instead of having a whole website you coud just have a kinda front page thing, i think lordoftherings.co.uk does something like that....

[Alatar]

ya sort of only like a few pages aloud or only 1, but if say the people who are not Subscribeing have an interest in having a small webpage so that they could brag to there freinds or have there own pictures/paintings on there own page or whatever, then with that idea in mind they might subscribe, but if it was to small then it wouldn't be worth offering

[Bonos-Girl]

i guess....mayeb you cold have a limit of however much space rather than a limit on pages.

[Reflux]

you could have a forwarding page
so
http://name.warofthering.net
would automatically forward to the web address of their choice.
That wouldnt be to hard to set up and would be a pretty cool thing for your "clientele" to brag to their mates about :p

a forwarding email, should be simple, thats considering that u actually own this server, considering how much you spend on this site each month you must own it otherwise you're doing something wrong :p

I'm still shocked by the cost, the only way it could get so high is through bandwidth, how much does the site go through each month?

[Illuvatar]

Well....now that this thread has resurfaced.......we are launching an email service very very soon. So keep an eye (or two) open! hehe

And as far as how much BW we use...well......on the average we use between 1.25 and 1.75 TB per month. And yea.....that's the reason for the cost.

[Goldberry]

Hi,

Sorry for my lack of computer knowledge, but I want to add your link to my site, bbloonscharities.net and am not sure how to do that. I can put it on each page or just the main page, whatever you think is best. I will also open up a thread in our Forum.

Thanks for the help, and I hope the fund raising is helping.

[Fatty]

Goldberry, thanks...well if you are just adding us to your links area then just link to the main page, if its about supporting subscription or such then link up to the subscription page :-)

Many thanks :)


Reflux, we don't own the server as such. We just rent it, as its then easier for us to upgrade or downgrade. The main cost is in bandwidth. We actually pay by mb/s at 95% of the monthly average.

Usually we stay under our base of 10mb/s per month, when we go over we pay $100 per mb/s over. this sort of works out as our base being 3000gb per month and additional 350gb blocks being $100. Some days we use 30gb and other we use 150gb. Over this period it will be nearer the upper amount due to the number of people searching for Tolkien related sites going up by a factor of about 8, if last year is anything to go by.

E-mail is on its way, probably pop3 with antispam and 30 mb.

We did think about a sort of subscribers sites thing and we could impliment it, but I am not sure the expense of a good program to manage it would be worth it for the site.

We don't really have time to manually set them up in the sense of subdomains so it would have to be via a script of sorts.

Hope that lets you know our current thinking a bit. As ever suggestions and questions are welcome.

Oh I was thinking of maybe sending a wotr coin to any annual subscribers too...Three current subscribers have also asked for a way to pay more per month, which is very generous...but i am not sure about that yet.

Fatty

[Shazzle]

Hi all

I just tried to subscribe thru paypal but not sure the process was completed correctly. Should I have received any feedback confirming my subscription? Thanks heaps and good luck!

[Gwaihir]

I never knew the site cost so much to run! :o I hope you get enough to keep it going. Cool prizes, btw. :thumbs:
As much as I would like to help and win prizes, I cannot do anything about it for the moment. :( sorry!

[Fatty]

Shazzle, you should get an e-mail from Illuvatar later today. It is a sort of welcome letter. If you do not get one by about 8pm PST then e-mail illuvatar@warofthering.net with the details. We send them manually and so mention in the signup to allow 49 hours just incase.

Thanks for subscribing, it all really helps us out. This holiday has been crazy, almost twice as busy as last year. This is the problem as income does not always increase with visitors. :-)

Gwaihir, yes busy websites are expensive to run. I think many people are so used to the web being free. But now with people wanting video downloads and fancy graphics it is very expensive. So sites have to try and cover costs via adverts, subscription etc. If we had not shut our downloads last week we would already be owing hundreds more than we are.

An example is say we put up a 10mb file and 20,000 people download it in a day. That would cost us about $100 or so extra for that day just for that file. Now it very unlikely that any of those people will have bought anything through the site or donated. So you can see how it mounts up.

Moral support is almost as good as financial :-) So thanks.

[Shazzle]

Thanks Fatty. Happy to help such a worth cause :)

[Fatty]

I should also mention after the rush is over lots of new things happening on WotR. With hotmail style wotr accounts for all subscribers (maybe limited ones for non) as well as the new version of the forums which is feature rich.

There is also a sister encylopedia site in the pipe which will use wotr forum as well as a non-related site I am working on.

So lots coming to tide you over till The Hobbit :)

[Illuvatar]

Hey ya Shazzle,

Well...it looks like something didn't go through right. I've sent you a PM with all the details. If you need any further help, just give a shout! :p

[Feebeefi]

I will offer all moral support.I wish I could help financially.Sorry I can't!:( :( :(
ONE day I will be able to help!(When I'm old enough heehee);)

I hope you will be able to cover your costs(never knew it was THAT expensive:o :elfeek: :o :elfeek: )

I wish you all the luck in the world:thumbs: and if you need any more moral support or any help give me a yell:thumbs:

[Shazzle]

Originally posted by Illuvatar
Hey ya Shazzle,

Well...it looks like something didn't go through right. I've sent you a PM with all the details. If you need any further help, just give a shout! :p

Just tried again and had the same problem. When I click the continue button the page comes back as it was with my details but with USA as the country.

I did notice though that my name is misspelt on the card so will go and try again using the misspelling and see if that works.

I will get subscribed eventually Illuvatar :)

[Illuvatar]

lol.....Not a problem!

And we'll get you the "goodies" straight away! :p

[Shazzle]

Tried twice with different cards. Neither seemed to work. I keep getting a Template Load failure after clicking continue.

[Fatty]

Thanks folks for the support. It is indeed a pricey business. But apart from recent problems due to sheer numbers our server is very stable. But that also costs, we could get 10 servers with Ev1 or another cheap host. But the site would be down all the time and we would spend all our time admining instead of creating the site :-)

Things are going well with the donations, many thanks for those who have dipped into their wallets. We are also in restructuring talks with our ISP.