Battlestar Wiki talk:Site support/Proposals

Good idea/bad idea

Just thought I'd get the ball rolling. --Steelviper 12:01, 12 July 2006 (CDT)

What would be the needed specs on a server? --FrankieG 13:00, 12 July 2006 (CDT)

Good question. I'm thinking we'd need at least a two hamster-wheel model. Joe might have an idea what the hosting company is currently running it on? I've built PC's, but I lack experience with "industrial strength" hardware.--Steelviper 13:28, 12 July 2006 (CDT)

Building a server wouldn't be such an issue... I think that'd be the easiest part. However, my expertise in running a webserver is limited, since computers are more of a hobby for me at this point in my life. However, a server would have to run Linux or some form of Unix capable of running MediaWiki. Also, we would need somewhere about 100 GB in storage, if not more. (Depending on how the wiki grows.) The difficult part would be bandwidth and making sure we have a 99% uptime. -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate} 18:31, 12 July 2006 (CDT)

That's something that the staff we'll lay off should have been able to do (had we not layed them off). Pretty short-sighted of us... --Steelviper 06:48, 13 July 2006 (CDT)

I'll thorw this in.. I used to administrator a webhosting company off Linux using C-Panel. I also know Linux pretty well as in "commands" and stuff. So any help I can offer in these departments is able to be use. Joe is correct in the bandwidth problem. Finding a server, even a basic server setup with miniuml specs, is easy to find, but the place to find good bandwidth is another. So.. that's my two cents. Shane ^{(T - C - E)} 06:52, 13 July 2006 (CDT)

Finance Committee

I just thought I'd get on-wiki what I proposed on the blog. Perhaps we need a formal "Finance Comittee" to actively identify and pursue potential revenue sources. While I know Joe is perfectly capable of such tasks, it'd be nice if we could help do some of the grunt work in terms of calling/emailing/otherwise contacting places to inquire about particular solutions. One member I'd suggest right away would be Mercifull, who has already had several good ideas and recently suggested another idea (shameless affiliate link copied). It doesn't need to be anything big or really formal, but just make semi-regular reports about progress and hopefully get the finance ball rolling. --Steelviper 09:02, 8 November 2006 (CST)

Adbrite Thoughts

Mercifull and I were bouncing some ideas about advertising, and here is a summary of some of the points that came up:

Wikia and some other major players use AdBrite.
Ads that take up content space are annoying (see wikia's right side ads).
Maybe we could look at putting the ads in the left bar (below everything else), on the bottom (around the copyright stuff), or after all other content.
AdBrite displays contextual ads, so you could have advertising that's relevant to a given article.
You have editorial control over ads that you place/sell using AdBrite, and people can buy ads for our particular site to target a BSG/Scifi audience.
AdBrite appears to be one of the major AdSense alternatives, but it may bring in less revenue than AdSense (with the gain of not being cutoff without appeal and more control over the ads).
We could sign up for an account and test the look/feel in the hangarbay before deploying anything on a "live" site.

Pipe in any other thoughts I missed, Merc, or anything else. --Steelviper 10:44, 8 November 2006 (CST)

Not really much else to add. Sign up and try it out on the hangar bay really is all I can say. You can change all the colours to match the site themeand if you were clever with the CSS would could make it different colours depending on the theme loaded so it always looked right. I had a few other idea about places to affiliate with for the target audience (eg. online computer parts stores, music and dvd shops, amazon, digital television) Ive got tomorrow off work so i'll probably come online and do a bit of research then --Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 11:54, 8 November 2006 (CST)

This might be important (taken from AB site)

You can choose to review each ad before it appears on your site. You can set the price for ads bought directly on your site. You can even have AdBrite show another ad network (your Google AdSense ads, Burst, etc.) if we can’t meet your minimum revenue requirement

--Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 12:01, 8 November 2006 (CST)

I've signed up for AdBrite. The results are posted at the bottom of each page at ze bloug. Thoughts? -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate} 19:51, 8 November 2006 (CST)

Not bad (once I turned off a certain Firefox extension). It stands out against the white, but it blends with the overall scheme. I guess I'm eager to see a test run on the hangarbay (once it is up and running). But in general, the text is better than images and it's pretty unobtrusive. What where your thoughts on placement in the page scheme? --Steelviper 20:05, 8 November 2006 (CST)

Either below the footer, just in the area above the footer between the article text. -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate} 20:09, 8 November 2006 (CST)

I like it. Once that's up and running, are there any organizations/entities that we can think of that'd be interested in advertising to our audience? Obviously once the pagehits start accumulating they'll be a lot more attractive, but I was wondering if there might be any particular sites that would have a natural "symbiotic" advertising relationship with us. I'd suggest NBC/Universal, but in a way this entire site is a gigantic (free) advertisement for them, so I'm not sure if they'd really care to pay extra (and also I don't want them to squish us). However, if the powers that be can afford covert internet PR campaigns (as some of the more paranoid believe), they can surely spare some change for a helpful little wiki. --Steelviper 20:30, 8 November 2006 (CST)

I have a reccomendation for some code changes to the advert. At the moment its centred to the entire page instead of just the middle of the content section and so on some resolutions the nav side bar covers up parts of the advert. I reccoment either moving it into the content section just below the categories or into the red copyrights footer at the very bottom. Also sometimes the image which says "Your ad here" is misaligned, possibly due to the css, and looks a bit weird. Also if there are no ads to display just the "your ad here" picture loads and it looks totally weird just seems to stick out in the middle of nowhere. This is why I have some modified advertising code which takes away the sideways "your ad here" and instead puts a plain text based link underneath the advert banner itself. This is not only much clearer than the sideways link but also more personalised and thus an advertiser may be more likely to click. See below:

<script type="text/javascript"> var AdBrite_Title_Color = 'EAF15F'; var AdBrite_Text_Color = 'E6E6E6'; var AdBrite_Background_Color = '1F0B0B'; var AdBrite_Border_Color = '461919'; </script> <script src="http://ads.adbrite.com/mb/text_group.php?sid=179555" type="text/javascript"></script> <a href="http://www.adbrite.com/mb/commerce/purchase_form.php?opid=179555&afsid=1">Advertise on the Battlestar Wiki</a>

What do people think? --Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 21:10, 11 November 2006 (CST)

Peter's Idea

Peter idea is very easy and I think it can work while still be attractive. The simplest way is for someone to have the max number of exposers would be placing an ad in the site notice area. Now I hate ads and so does other people but with add services like adbrite, a service has to share space. not fun if you are trying to be competitive.

The idea is simply (across all wikis) to have it say "Battlestar Wiki brought to you by xxxxxxxxxxxx" with a simple link. Now if a pool of people want to do it, we like it to Battlestar Wiki:Site support/11 2024 supporters and we sysop the pages and discussion pages from appearing with any "bad" info. --Shane ^{(T - C - E)} 11:36, 10 November 2006 (CST)

That wouldn't be bad. The issue, though, is still our core problem. "Show me the money." Or in this case, show me the people that will pay for that link. I'm not saying such people don't exist, just that we'd need to find them and come up with a way to retrieve payment from them. And when their month is up, we'd have to make sure that we had the next month covered as well. One thing that AdBrite buys us straight off is some public pageview and click-through stats that can serve to entice advertisers to buy space (and ideally future space). And with the built-in payment mechanism, as well as stock "network" ads to help pay the bills when particular days aren't covered, it seems like it's worth the cut that we'd end up giving to them. I'd love for Battlestarwiki to be completely financially independent, but I don't see where we'd get the $130+ per month to cover Joe's costs. --Steelviper 11:45, 10 November 2006 (CST)

Actually, I think the most logical place to look for support is from users, not advertisers - the site notice would be a nice way of offering kudos, and perhaps a link back to contributors pet projects. I can certainly afford to chip in $130/year, which means we just have to find 11 other users willing to contribute at that level. If that proves too difficult, we could split a month's support two or three ways. Naturally, if we can raise the full amount per month, I would hope the graphical advertisements could be dispensed with. --Peter Farago 01:46, 13 November 2006 (CST)

I agree that ads (especially graphical ads) are no fun. However my support for the advertising stemsfrom a desire to see a consistent revenue stream (so Joe isn't ever stuck with the bill). Also, part of me wishes that our contributors only needed to contribute time/effort to the wiki. That somehow the content that we generate is valuable enough itself that people wouldn't need to contribute time, effort, AND money. "Hey, thanks for contributing all this time and stuff, but can you loan me some money? I need about three-fitty." I'd definitely love it if the community that uses it found it useful enough to support it ad-free. I just fear that in this age where people presume that content (music/movies/software) is/should be free, that they wouldn't be willing to put their money where the server's mouth is. Maybe I'm wrong though. PBS manages it, but then again all the fundraising efforts they make seems to amount to advertising anyway. I guess we could try to cover a month, and see where it goes from there. --Steelviper 06:54, 13 November 2006 (CST)

In principle, I don't find advertisements a whole lot of fun either. However, they are a necessary evil which we must deal with if we are ever to be self-sufficient and not reliant on one person's (or even one group's) finances. Also, there's something unbecoming to me about begging for handouts from other contributors, since I feel much the same way SV does on the subject. -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate} 10:41, 13 November 2006 (CST)

If I tipped $130 toward the site, would you take down the advertising and put up a message to the effect of: "Battlestar Wiki is brought to you ad-free for the month of December by Peter Farago. If you would like to become a sponsor, click here." We'll see if anyone else bites, and if not, we can go back to advertising support. I'm personally very much in favor of PBS/NPR style fundraising over adverts. --Peter Farago 11:05, 13 November 2006 (CST)

Well, I've come up with a few ideas (or modifications to ideas already presented) below. Depending on what we go with, that would be the answer to your query. -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate} 14:12, 13 November 2006 (CST)

We can use this idea in conjunction with AdBrite. Also, I'm signing up via Amazon.com and a few other online retailers for referrals, so when that gets set, we'll be able to add that to our revenue stream. -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate} 12:17, 10 November 2006 (CST)

I changed a load of amazon links for the DVDs to the Wiki store with your referral link in place so if anyone clicks them and buys then the wiki will get some funds. I will shortly be checking all the book and CD links to make sure they utilise the wiki store. p.s you need to add Amazon to the whitelist for hotlinked images, the logo shows up as "no hotlinking" on the store :D --Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 08:31, 13 November 2006 (CST)

I was also looking into signing up to be an amazon.co.uk affiliate. Also, since we're a B&N affiliate, I need to add those links to the corresponding pages as well. As for the image thing, I thought we'd alread addressed that -- unless there's another site calling it up. I'll check into that too. -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate} 10:41, 13 November 2006 (CST)

A couple ideas

In response to Peter's question above, I've come with a few ideas (or am merely re-iterating and modifying ideas as I understand them thus far):

Idea 1

Whenever either someone or a group of people donates enough to cover one month's worth of hosting, ads will be removed for a one month period, starting the first day of the next month (to keep things easier to track).

For instance, say John Doe #1 donates $130 on January 3rd. Ads will continue to run until the beginning of February. When February 1st rolls around, the ads will be removed from the site until March 1st. During the period of February, we would also add "Battlestar Wiki, the free online reference and episode guide brought to you by John Doe #1."

Idea 2

Similar to idea #1, with the exception that we only take ads off the english Batlestar Wiki. We will still have ads on media, zh, et al. This would help encourage contributors to other language wikis to donate as well.

Idea 3

We find a way to offer an "ads-free" solution to our members. For instance, if you donate a minimum of $5 per month, you get the "ads-free" version of Battlestar Wiki. This would probably take a little work on the programming side, but this would probably be the best solution, accomodating both those who are willing to put their money where their mouth is, per se, and those who are apathetic regarding the ads.

Thoughts? Ideas? -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate} 14:02, 13 November 2006 (CST)

Liking the idea of number three, its an idea ive suggested for another site I am a very frequent visitor too. But they dont really care for the users much and would rather spam the site with popups and spyware :( --Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 14:23, 13 November 2006 (CST)

I like idea number one - if we go with it, I might suggest that we list the four largest donors per month, with a link to the complete list, to keep things concise. Idea two is good, but I think we should take into account the relative traffic of each language edition. Idea three bothers me somewhat - I want to view this as a community effort, not a private club. --Peter Farago 15:50, 13 November 2006 (CST)