OK everyone . . .

Friends,

I know that some of you have already responded to Rich's appeal for help in relation to the financial upkeep of the cornsnake forums, but I just wanted to throw my two cents' worth out here.

I found this site by accident a few years ago. It helped me in several ways:

Provided me with an opportunity to "talk" to those who have had much more experience and understanding with/of my beloved snakes than I, allowing me the chance to grow in knowledge.

Provided me with a source to find quality snakes to purchase from respected breeders/dealers, allowing me to grow my private collection and breeding stock.

Provided me with an outlet of FREE advertising whereby I am able to find good homes to my animals, resulting in customers that will continue to look for me here at THIS site, allowing me to grow in my fledgling business pursuits.

Providing me a true forum for the expression of ideas in relation to a subject about which I am passionate: corns, allowing me to grow in passion day by day.

I am certain that many of you have experienced similar growth in your cornsnake hobbies/businesses. Won't you now help Rich keep this wonderful tool open for us all to use and enjoy? How many people have you "met" online because of this site? Is that not worth it to you to see your way clear to donate a few dollars to keep it alive?

It is to me, and I encourage all of you to give something, whatever you can, to give back a little to a FREE website. A source of information, entertainment, knowledge, and commraderie from which we ALL have deeply drawn.

Okay, I've only been on here for a month or so ... but have learnt far more than I have from any book or web site (and I've read a few). This site truly is fantastic, and I'd hate to see it go.

To me it would seem strange taking all this information for free, yet happily paying £10 for a book which may turn out to be awful (obviously not the beloved manual )

Rich, just an idea: If you found a clothing company who would print pictures of corn snakes on T shirts (I'm sure people would get their designing hats on again, even without the bribe of two lavenders) you could sign up as an affiliate and make some cash on each item that we all order

Just a thought - it may not even work ...

In the mean time, find a donation. It's only small, but I'm skint at the moment. More will follow.

On behalf of everyone here - cheers Rich

i agree with you darin. i found this site about three or four months ago. i have learned a lot more in those three or so mths. then i learned in 5 years of reading about corns. another thing i liked about this site was that i found people who share at least one thing in common with me.CORNS.Rich i think the idea of donations is an excellent choice. we cant expect you to pay for all the expenses when we are the one that are utilizing this info.i also think whiffins idea is a good one with one exception why not print your own tees.one other thing i thought about. myself and a lot of others have bought alot of corns from people that we would never have meet otherwise, why dont you cahrge a fee of like 10-15 dollars a year to post an ad in the for sale section. i dont think to many people wold disagree with this because a lot of the corns that are sold through this site might not have been sold otherwise. well keep an eye on that donation box cause mines coming in friday.it wont make it swell but i hope it helps.

gregg

Here is another idea:

It may not be feasible for all sorts of reasons, but what about making a corn snake calendar of some sort? It could be one formed completely on Rich's fabulous pictures, or it could be a compilation of shots donated to "the cause." I know I would be thrilled to have one of my "pride and joy" animals pinned up on everyone's refrigerators!

The cost of such a calendar would be minimal to Rich, and would be a great seller, I would think. It would even be a novelty to be sold at shows. It might just work. You already have nearly a thousand customers waiting for such an opportunity from these forums alone. Let's see, at $10 profit a piece, that would be . . .

Darin and Gregg,
You both have great ideas on how to help. I too have only been around for a little while and have learned more info from here than I would any where else. Plus I get to "met" great people who all care about corns and many other herps for that matter. I would buy a calendar in a heart beat. Or how about charging a minimal amount to be a member. and being a member gets you a slight discount from a serpenco purchase? I'm not talking a huge discount just a little something. Gregg's idea of charging for posting in the "for sale" section is a very good idea. I am hoping that in two years when I "HOPEFULLY" have babies, this site will be here and I am able to sell them through here. That way i would know that they are going to people that actually care about them and will give them a good home. My check is in the mail, it isn't much. Since my wife just told me we were buying a house but I hope it will help some what!!

Ken

Well, I sent mine in...

but then, why not pay good money to keep this a FREE site?









Oh well, nothing lasts forever.

(I've never been able to figure out that "send money and receive absolutely Free" equation.)

Darin Chappell said:

I found this site by accident a few years ago. It helped me in several ways:

Click to expand...

Just a quick question....because I am cornfused... is this even a few years old? I thought it was about a year old, are you talking about the Serpenco message board or Fuana Classifieds? Or am I missing something?
Please don't take offense, I don't mean to discredit you, I am just trying to figure out what I am missing.

Maybe Rich should look into www.cafepress.com

They let you set up a "store" to sell items such as t-shirts, hats, mugs, mousepads, etc., (and there is a calendar for the holiday season). You upload a picture or design, set a "profit price", and they print the items...for free. All their things have a "base price" on them, so that's how they make thier money (if you sell thier 3.99 wall calendar for 6.99, you get $3.)

I think a calendar is a great idea! Just imagine... the 12 months of cornsnake morphs... candycanes for december (christmas), lavenders for march or april (easter), ghosts for october (halloween)... or okeetee october, motley may, snow september...
I'd buy one.


Dawn (who will donate something as soon as she has spending money again... just bought more snakes!)

Carol,

I was referring to the whole package of the BOI, cornsnakes forum, et al. I am not even sure exactly how long I have been posting on these boards, now that you mention it. I know that the first incarnation of the BOI of which I was a part (I think there was even another one before that) has been scrapped, and my post numbers had to start all over. I think that was two years ago, or so. I THOUGHT the cornsnakes forums had been around for a couple of years too, but I could definitely be mistaken about that! I know FOR A FACT that I have been posting much longer than the current format shows me being active. I "joined" much earlier than April of this year. Hehe

However, the point remains the same; I have been around a while, and that time has been nothing but beneficial to me in many, many ways. I hope we can all keep it around for a long time to come.

Cas,

Snow has to be for January, and Blizzard for February!

I think that might actually be "do-able!"

He he... I was just going by 1st letters... <b>S</b>eptember, <b>S</b>now... (besides, up here we do get some snow in sept. sometimes )

Too bad there aren't any green corns yet... would be great for the 1st month of spring!

Dawn

This thread had me thinking back, wondering just how long ago it was when I started my first message board.

My first website was actually set up and hosted by Bryan Mohr of herp.com. I believe that may have been back in 1995 or 1996, but I can't find anything to reference back that far. That was several computers ago, so I can't even check dates on files. I didn't have a message board there anyway, but I'm just trying to establish some references as to when I actually got into this web based stuff.

I registered the domain name 'serpenco.com' back in 1997, I think, but I don't remember how long it took me to set up the first generation message board system on there. Couldn't have been very long after I had set up my own domain, and it was of course, the SerpenCo Forum. But in most cases, many people treated it like a cornsnake forum, since that was my primary focus and mostly all I was interested in talking about anyway.

I registered the domain name 'cornsnakes.com' in 1998, but I'm pretty sure it was much later when I set up the message board there. Matter of fact, I believe it was right when Jeff Barringer closed down all of the message boards on his site because of that threatened lawsuit by Joe Polanco. That's when I felt a cornsnake forum was needed, because there was no clue as to whether Jeff was going to reopen the forums again.

The original BOI on FaunaClassifieds.com (which was HerpWantAds.com back then) was 2 years old this past October 1. I still have all the original messages from that first BOI, but I just haven't gotten around to putting them up on the server and setting up links to it. There is also the issue of indexing all of those files for the search function that I need to address before I can do that anyway.

You all wouldn't believe what I had to go through in order to edit or delete offensive messages back then. What a nightmare! Good old days, my foot!

Darn, is it 3:40am already? No wonder I can't keep my eyes open...... I'm out of here.........

Thanks Darin, I was hoping you would take that the right way. I know you have been around forever, I was just trying to see if I was missing something (because that is the case very often). I think a calendar would be great. I have often though of creating one myself but I never got around to it. But who better than Rich to put one out, since he gets all the amazing shots!

OK, here's the scoop... (IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ!)

The donations I have gotten from people for this site may be too little too late. My server has been running VERY slowly all day long, so I contacted the tech support people about it to see if they could figure out the problem. Well, it looks like maybe they have:

The main reason you server is running soo slow is because you are running out of Memory. You currently have only 25Mb of free memory left and are using 366MB of swap space. I would highly recommend upgrading your server's memory to at least 512MB.

Click to expand...

So it looks like I am going to have to see how much more memory is going to cost me. If it is more than I am willing to spend, I will likely have to choose between shutting down this forum (cornsnakes.com) or my faunaclassifieds site. Since FaunaClassifieds is bringing in advertisers and this one is not, this will be a no-brainer decision.

I do hate to do this, but I see no other rational choice available to me.

Is it not possible to purge any old files and forums?

Old pictures, for example, would really reduce the size!

If a loss of info was a problem, perhaps a FAQ - I'm sure someone would make one ...

Just a thought

yeah

i agree with wiffin. dont you thik you could delete some of the older threads that have been on here since the beginning. i wouldntmind answering the question that new users usally ask. i mean yeah we would be answering repetitive questions but dont we already do that when we get a new user. very rarely do new users know about the search option. most of them just wanna get an answer as quick as they can. with out doing any research(no offence intended just my opinion) i know i did when i first found this site. then i found the search option and started to utilize it.just adding my 0.02

gregg

Actually, none of those suggestions would help. You have to know what the swap file space is used for. In a nutshell, this space contains actively running programs. When there are more programs running then will fit into RAM, segments are copied out to the hard drive and called back into RAM as needed. This swapping of memory segments back and forth to disk is what slows down the system. The larger the memory space, the less chance you will run out of memory and have to access the hard drive. The more users active on the server at any one time, the more RAM that is used, as each user will get their own chunk of RAM for the program they are running while viewing a web page from the server.

I checked into prices on more RAM and it looks like it will cost me an additional $30 or $79 more per month on top of my server lease costs. I'm not sure how they are pricing it, so I have to wait to hear back from them. This isn't TOO bad as long as I have some income coming in from advertisers on my FaunaClassifieds site. It would certainly help to have some on thsi site, but no one is exactly beating down the doors to help out that way.

Anyway, perhaps things will be OK if I add the additional RAM. I should know more tomorrow.

Thanks.

hey rich

how many members are on this forum and the fauna classifieds forum. maybe you could charge a fee. like 10-15 dollars a year or something like that. i would gladly pay up to 25-30 dollars a year to have access to these sites. they have been a big help to me.

gregg

Rich, I'm just curious how many unique hits these message boards get per day or week... I would imagine you get some pretty heavy traffic on the site, and I'm kind of surprised that no advertisers would want to take advantage of that (even non-reptile related companies could be interested, assuming you don't have restrictions on the type of advertising). I'm wondering if you have (or have thought about) avertising your advertising space? I mean, there are a lot of users on this forum, but how many of them actually have a business, much less one that is big enough to advertise here? It may just be the kind of thing where you have to put more money in (yeah, oh joy, right? ) by buying some ads on some other sites, to get people aware of the traffic and opportunity availble to put ads up here... in theory, the ads, and then the board, should then pay for themselves.

There are also some companies (or at least, there used to be) who will give you a code for a rotating banner ad, and then pay based on the # of click throughs... no idea how well those things work, but it may be an idea.

(Of course, you've probably thought of all this, in which case you can just ignore me completely )

Just some thoughts,
Dawn