First thing's first: Merry Belated Christmas. I hope everyone (and their family's) made it through this tough year and enjoyed the holidays.
Now, straight to the point- Contrary to popular belief, the other staff members cannot perform the duties that I perform, no matter what their "permission" levels are. That is not a dig at them in any way... but as far I'm aware, none of them are trained I.T. professionals that are interested in the task. Also, they don't have the dozens of passwords to vendor websites that provide software updates and licensing for our server, SSL certificates, domain names, forum software, & other services... nor do they have the credit card to pay for any of that.
I am a hugely private person. All I'm willing to say is that for the past year, an increasing amount of obstacles have prevented me from
being able to care for the 3 websites that I manage. Late in the year, it deteriorated to the point where I was basically checking to see if the sites loaded on my phone and calling it a 'win'. I did not see the search problems, the uploading problems, the posting problems, or anything else. That's on me. The staff does an incredible amount of work as volunteers, it is not their responsibility to tend to major technical issues.
To those of you in this thread trying to incite idiotic behavior, shame on you. At the end of a year when 333,000 U.S. Citizens have died during a global pandemic, you come out swinging at me for being mysteriously absent, not even asking why I'm unable to handle things... or, if I'm still alive. There is a lot more going on in this world beyond eLightbars, many more important issues.
As for John Marcson, I need to check in on him, I haven't spoken to him since mid-2019. As mentioned, he is solely the reason for this community's success dating all the way to the late 90's. If John came to me and told me he wanted to take the site back, I would hand it to him with no questions asked. Like me, he had things to handle... personal life happened.
Since it was mentioned again, let the record reflect that the loss of content or data on eLightbars was largely out of our control:
- In 2010, other parties took control of eLightbars with malicious intent. Although control of the domain name was able to be recovered by John, the site's database remained in the other party's hands and later became Lightbarn. When eLightbars got back up and running (fresh start), Lightbarn failed.
- Somewhere after that, we were attempting to offload our surprisingly large attachment storage to Amazon because our server's disk space couldn't accommodate it. We utilized a 3rd party module to make it all work. The module renamed ALL of the attachments and associated the files with the post it came from in the database. Following a forum software update, the module broke and the database tables became corrupt. We had thousands of images with random filenames and no way to associate them with the broken links in the forums. The 3rd party developer was no longer reachable nor was he releasing new products/support.
So, the elephant in the room: advertisements. It's easy for you to sit at your computer or look at your phone and assume that I have full and complete control over the ads you see, or even that I know where (and how large) advertisements are. You're 100% wrong. Google can place whatever they want, wherever they want despite the settings I've dictated. The content within the ads is 100% dictated by YOU, the end-user and your search history among other things.
The idiotic notion that I'm greedy or that I'm embezzling from my own 1-person company is hilarious. What hits my "company" bank account every year is the sum of managing 3 websites and some occasional moderate technical work on websites of customers referred to me.
As for subscriptions, the total for 2020 is 11, plus 2 lifetime memberships from previous years.
The remaining sources of income are Google Ads, Amazon Associates (ads/referrals), and eBay Partner Network (ads/referrals). Google is usually the only dependable source of income, the others are dependent on users clicking an ad and actually buying something right at that time.
To that, you can apply the costs:
- Server/Hosting
- Software Licensing & Maintenance
- Domain Names
- SSL Certificates
- Addons, Modules
- Service Level Tools
- Incidentals
Fact: some months I have an excess in the bank account, most months I'm feeding it from my personal account... but the bills have always been paid.
@southpaw @John Smith @toyotafan
I don't know why you think I... we owe you
anything. We are, or were at one time, all enthusiasts just like you are. No one is entitled to this site being online and available to you. If you think the site is poorly managed or that I'm shady with the finances, or that the moderators are unsatisfactory, or that completely unintentional bugs/errors are so heinous that you have to launch a verbal assault on the site and its staff... I invite you to log out and never log back in. However, you are more than welcome to be here, and I would hope that you would rather help us get back to the "John Marcson" days of eLightbars.
And just for the record, eLightbars pulls in less than 1/3 of the other site that is similarly built. I can confidently say that if the other site was no longer able to carry the difference, eLightbars might not exist at all.
Should you deicide to "start another site", I wish you the best. As long as it doesn't become a problem for our members (trashing, trolling, fighting), links to your new forum would be welcome.
Again, thank you to the other administrators and moderators who volunteer their time to keep this site organized and under control. And as always, thank you to the members who have contributed to the community over the years. I'm sorry for the recent, extended usability issues. That kind of thing is unacceptable to me as an end-user, and I know the frustration. Believe me when I tell you that I did as much as I was
able to do, which wasn't enough.