By: Brad Burt - RedHouse

Resource Changes At The Forum-Vibe Project

We have minimized content to minimize web costs
(free information ...is not actually free!)

   So many people around the world have enjoyed the Forum-Vibe Project which started in 2001 on the DIY forums, and a little later I put up the web content in 2004. These 17 years since this project went online the Forum-Vibe Project has been hosted on our company website borrowing it's resources and bandwidth as people surfed through our website and got served the 824 files of information.

   The Forum-Vibe Project website was supposed to help pay for itself via PCB sales which we knew would not likely cover the entire cost but should offset at least some of the cost.

   In the following 10 years from 2004 to 2014 it became obvious that PCB sales are not significant enough to offset the traffic/bandwidth costs, so in 2014 we decided to add some "Donate" buttons (PayPal buttons) to each Forum-Vibe Project webpage.

   We hoped as people are reading, learning, printing and using the free information we provided we hoped a portion of those people might be cool enough to click a Donate button and make a small donation to help cover the costs of keeping the website on the internet... Ya?, not so much.

   Exactly 4 people clicked a Donate button in that 5 year period from 2014-to-2019, donating a grand sum-total of $8 to help support the Forum-Vibe Project
(and BTW, thank you 4 people who donated!)

   During the period between February 2017 through December 2019 the Forum-Vibe Project had 96,107 page views from 7,601 visitors in 74 countries.

   Think about those numbers for a moment, if those 7,601 web site viewers who used the Forum-Vibe Project webpages had made any donation at all, even a small donation like 1¢, we could have offset the web services bill significantly.

   Yes, a bummer it is, but the time has come for us to acknowlege the simple fact that the users of the Forum-Vibe Project webpages are not interested in helping us keep it online. We've given it a good run from 2004 to 2020, but it is, what it is. (sigh)

   Moving forward we have now minimized the content of the The Forum-Vibe Project webpages to minimize the bandwidth from the traffic, which will minimize our out-of-pocket expenses for costs generated by the Forum-Vibe Project.