David,
"...Which reminds me, I have to make a contribution, then on the other hand, if you get enough paid advertisements, even that won't be necessary
"
I am in the process of thinking about better possibilities to finance the site, so that I can also offer more features and to reduce the workload, which is too much for me alone beside my job.
Paid advertising could be one possibility, but only if it would not be too aggressive to the members. I do not like at all the Yahoo-Groups-way of advertising. Similar on other free sites with tons of pop-up ads. I think this makes a forum uncomfortable to use.
Another question is, whether the members are feeling comfortable with "non aggressive" ads. In the past I had the opinion, that this would kill the attractivity, but as I am reading now, members seem not to mind if there is some kind of advertising. As long as it is not to extreme.
But even if I find a way of "nice" paid advertising, it will never cover all the costs. So the donation or subscriptions will be still needed. Since a few weeks I offer also more benefits for subscribers. This is more disc-space in the photo-gallery and a higher file-size limit. More benefits will come in the future. This all for a very low monthly fee of 2 USD. See for more details the "subscribe" navigation bar.
If there is no problem with the members, another idea could be to talk with Kyocera and Zeiss itself. At the end of the day they benefit the most of this community. It is the best marketing for them and finally they get to know what their costumers really want. If I read all the ND postings, it makes sense for Kyocera to read the postings and learn from them - if they are interested at all what their costumers are thinking.
If you think about it, we basically give them "instructions" how to build products, which we will definitely buy later on since we "developped" them. The best R&D I can think of.
The more I think about it, the more I find this idea quiet "sexy"
Anyway, I need some time to think about different ways, since I can not continue like this as in the past.
As Rico mentioned in his last posting, I do not like the role of a police-officer against spam. There must be a better solution. But Rico:
"This situation will not scale to a larger, more successful forum like dpreview.com."
I am not sure whether we do not compare here apples and oranges. dpreview is a great site, concentrated on all digital cameras, no matter which brandname. So the number of potential users will be logically a multiple of a one-brand-community, especially in a niche-market as Contax.
As far as I know, dpreview is the fulltime job of the owner. He lives from the paid-ad income. Of course he can then also put more work into it. But I am not planning to give up my job for this.
Any ideas and feedback of the different possibilities are welcome. I have to make a decision within the next weeks about this, so I would be very interested in your opinion about this.
Thanks
Dirk