Sorry, folks, unplanned site outage

[StoneNYC]

I know this is opening a can of worms here, but is there any kind of plan for a paid membership?

Similar to APUG where they have member galleries that are only accessible by subscribers.

The reason I asked really has nothing to do with me wanting to have more money for the site so that it doesn't crash, Its actually a selfish reason.

Basically I really like the way APUG is very secure, mostly professional photographers are subscribers, and they are the only ones that can view those particular images, I like the fact that only those people can view my images that I'm not publishing it for the world to see or for Google to have in it's cache.

So... Yea... That's all I've got.

And of course plus it would ensure money would be there to support the site

[SLVRGLTN]

I'm glad you all got it back online one thing I noticed was that the Still Life 2013 Thread had 55 pages but now it's 46 pages of images and comments

[Ralph Barker]

I know this is opening a can of worms here, but is there any kind of plan for a paid membership?

Similar to APUG where they have member galleries that are only accessible by subscribers.

The reason I asked really has nothing to do with me wanting to have more money for the site so that it doesn't crash, Its actually a selfish reason.

Basically I really like the way APUG is very secure, mostly professional photographers are subscribers, and they are the only ones that can view those particular images, I like the fact that only those people can view my images that I'm not publishing it for the world to see or for Google to have in it's cache.

So... Yea... That's all I've got.

And of course plus it would ensure money would be there to support the site

The idea of paid memberships, along with other revenue-generating methods, has been discussed in the past. The owner (Q. T. Luong) and the mods all agree, however, that the spirit of the site is better supported by keeping it free to all, and generally free of commercial interests.

[StoneNYC]

The idea of paid memberships, along with other revenue-generating methods, has been discussed in the past. The owner (Q. T. Luong) and the mods all agree, however, that the spirit of the site is better supported by keeping it free to all, and generally free of commercial interests.

What if after a year with your account along with X# of posts you get some kind of special "veteran"status to keep your photos only viewable to other veterans or something?

[David A. Goldfarb]

Fortunately there are different sites that follow different models and there are many options. LFF, APUG, the Rangefinder Forum, etc. all have their own characteristics and that's part of what makes them interesting.

[aruns]

Thanks for all the resources and effort put in by sponsors and volunteers.. Missed the site very much, glad it is back now. Thank you!

[Ralph Barker]

What if after a year with your account along with X# of posts you get some kind of special "veteran"status to keep your photos only viewable to other veterans or something?

Sorry, that isn't feasible without modifications to the vBulletin code. We generally avoid "tinkering" since doing so creates complications when upgrades and maintenance releases come out.

[StoneNYC]

Sorry, that isn't feasible without modifications to the vBulletin code. We generally avoid "tinkering" since doing so creates complications when upgrades and maintenance releases come out.

Ahh, that makes sense.

Oh well hah!

[Brian Sims]

Thanks to all who make this site possible.

One thing about us LFPers---we know how to wait: for the wind to die down, for the light to get right, for the wave to splash back just right, for the film to develop, and for the time to go reshoot the same thing with a better???. Waiting for the site to come back up was easy.

[Sevo]

We will occasionally have outages of more than a day, but so far the ones we've had haven't been of sufficient impact to warrant charging for membership here or adding advertisement revenue, which would be required if we needed to invest in a high availability infrastructure environment. The infrastructure we have, thanks to Brian's generosity, works fine 99+% of the time.

How about a volunteer driven backup solution? There must be quite a few users that are, like me, running LAMP servers of their own, with enough bandwidth and space to spare to carry the forum over a week or two without any extra expenses. If a list of the required software packages was kept in sync with all updates on the server, it should be fairly trivial to get a backup running within hours.