From: Paul Borghese (pborghese@groupstudy.com)
Date: Wed Apr 09 2008 - 15:19:45 ART
I have been somewhat neutral towards the paypal button idea. In a perfect
world I would be able to receive enough donations to pay to run the site.
But in the entire 10 years I have been running GroupStudy, I have only
received $275 in donations. But then again, I have not been encouraging
donations.
The issue is, on average I receive 20+ e-mail messages a day from people
that have some e-mail issue they seem incapable of figuring out for
themselves. If I were to answer each e-mail I would have to quit my day job
and just spend all day every day working on GroupStudy. So most messages
simply go unanswered (unless I have an unusually light schedule which is
rare).
OK, so now the same guy who does not understand how e-mail operates sends in
a $10 donation which does not even begin to cover the $400/month bill. Now
he is expecting service for his donation, which I can not provide.
I have been thinking in the past of having a gold membership with additional
benefits, but rejected the idea as I think it will kill the open
characteristic of GroupStudy.
By the way, I am also in discussion with some vendors to get them to sell
products to our list members at a substantial discount. With our buying
power we are able to get substantial discounts off list price. I will be
announcing that program in a few weeks.
Take care,
Paul Borghese
-----Original Message-----
From: ccie az [mailto:ccieaz@googlemail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 1:31 PM
To: Paul Borghese
Cc: ccielab@groupstudy.com
Subject: Re: Changes to GroupStudy
Thanks for all the work you put into keeping group study going Paul. I
know we all appreciate it.
I think someone before mentioned adding a Paypal donate button to the
site. Could this be a option to help with the support costs?
Az
2008/4/9 Paul Borghese <pborghese@groupstudy.com>:
> I have made a few changes with GroupStudy.
>
> 1. I am working on filtering postmaster messages from appearing on the
list. We block over 500 spam messages/day from appearing on the list and
I need to investigate how the postmaster messages are getting through. The
filters will hopefully lessen their intrusion
>
> 2. I have implemented Sender Policy Framework to help eliminate spammers
use of the domain. I would like to thank Zack Tennant for his
suggestion/help
>
> 3. A few weeks ago, I implemented automatic removal of e-mail accounts
that have delivery issues. Yahoo is the #1 culprit of non-delivery of
messages. If you are receiving the list messages from a Yahoo account, you
are in danger of being unsubscribed. When you subscribed to the list, the
welcome letter warned you against using Yahoo and Hotmail accounts as those
services only deliver about half of the messages posted on the list. We
simply can not keep them queued on GroupStudy until Yahoo decides to allow
delivery. I highly recommend you switch to Google Mail. Mention my name
and they will give you the gmail account for free :-) .
>
> 4. GroupStudy has been in existence for over 10 years now. It cost me
over $400/month to run GroupStudy, with very little outside support. We
need additional bandwidth/servers etc. and I simply can not continue to flip
the bill. Therefore I will be offering sponsorships for the list. The
sponsorship will consist of a welcome letter at the beginning of the month
welcoming the sponsor and a small two line footer on each outgoing message.
Certification Science (my employer) has agreed to sponsor us for the month
of April. If you know of other companies that may be interested in
sponsoring for future months, please have them send me a private e-mail. I
am trying to make the sponsorship as non-intrusive as possible.
>
> Take care,
>
> Paul Borghese
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
> Subscription information may be found at:
> http://www.groupstudy.com/list/CCIELab.html
Pass the CCIE in six weeks, Guaranteed!
http://www.certscience.com/CCIE
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