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Crouchie's Lawyer

By Crouchie's Lawyer,
in The Muppet Show

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SNSUN

SNSUN

Posted
Posted

General Announcement - Please read

 

Hi. As you may have noticed from the holding page that has been on http://www.thesaintsforum.co.uk for the last couple of days, the server appears to have finally given up the ghost. This has basically accelerated a plan of action we, as the admin team, have been discussing for some time, given the ever-increasing popularity of the forum and the technical problems that popularity has brought with it.

When this forum was launched in November 2006, we asked for donations from you, the members, to help keep it running. It was a relatively short-term approach in order that something was up and running quickly to plug the gap left by the closure of Saints Forever, and needless to say those donations were never going to last forever. For them to have lasted as long as they have done - more than 18 months - is a fantastic tribute to the generosity of all those who contributed at the launch.

However, as you will no doubt be aware, technical problems have been a fairly regular occurrence, particularly on match days which we feel is unacceptable, and have been looking for ways to improve matters. Other aspects that have been of concern are the lack of respect shown by users to each other, the lack of respect for the fairly simple and polite rules and requests asked of users by the admin team and the ease with which people who have been banned seem to be able to re-register. As such, we have agreed on the following course of action:

Firstly, the technical infrastructure of the forum will be vastly improved. That is to say that we will be moving to a new host offering improved technical specifications for the server, which should guarantee that the forum is working even at peak periods, so those who aren't at a game for whatever reason can still keep up with what's going on. The obvious downside to this is financial, and we have had to devise a plan to ensure that the forum becomes self-sufficient in the long-term.

Revenue will be generated predominantly from two places. Firstly, we will be imposing a new tiered structure of membership. The majority of the 8,000+ membership of the forum either don't post at all or post very rarely. For those people, the main change will be the appearance of a few adverts on the forum, predominantly powered by Google. These adverts will slowly be put in place over the next week. For those on this free level of membership (known as Tier 1), a limit of 3 posts per day will be imposed and private messaging and avatars will be disabled. For those of you who want to post more regularly, want to be able to send private messages and want the forum to be free of adverts, there is a Tier 2 level of membership. This level of membership will cost an annual subscription of £5. We have set this to what we believe to be an acceptable level in order to provide revenue for the forum to keep it running to its full potential. However, a slight flip-side to the reasoning is that (hopefully) users will be a little bit more considerate about what they write given that they have paid money for access and would have to pay again to re-register.

Secondly, as already touched upon, advertising will be placed on the forum, visible to those on free tiers of membership and also to those not logged in. The main board will remain invisible to those users not logged in or registered to offer an incentive to register.

We would like to add more features to the forum to make it more of a community. As such, we will shortly be launching a website to go alongside the forum called SaintsWeb. This site will contain latest news, statistics, columns, match reports, away ground guides, etc, and will also enable users to add comments on articles, so everyone can get involved and contribute to its success.

We would like to add things like live data feeds providing latest score information and that sort of thing, but until the level of subscriptions is high enough to enable us to afford it, those will remain on the wish list for now, as sadly they don't come cheap. Even the ability to print the Saints fixture list, for example, costs more than £300 per year due to the bizarre fact that the Football League (and Premier League) claim copyright over a series of dates and times.

We have drawn up a set of terms and conditions for users which will hopefully cover all aspects of the use of the forum. We believe they're fairly straightforward, and by users' continued use of the forum it is assumed that they are acceptable and that you agree to abide by them. Failure to do so could result in being banned from the forum, and .Tier 2. members would receive no refund on their subscription fee.

With regards to content on the new forum. Due to the old thesaintsforum database crashing, we were unable to rescure the posts. However, we were able to revive all the user accounts and PM's.

If you have any queries about the terms and conditions, please contact either Stevegrant or Baj on the forum 'Contact Us' link.

Visit SaintsWeb.co.uk

 

 

I re-read this message about 8 times every day, hoping that one day TSF will return...

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