Well, I understood it when there was a giant tidal wave of hits on the site last November (because of Good Wilt Hunting); and I guess we can assume that this month's is due to the BFAHP secret codes. But this is about the fourth time that I have received a warning from my server that I will be going over my bandwidth quota for the month. It's not going to be by much this time, but still, you know. The forum and even the chatroom are a much larger drain on bandwidth than the screengrabs ever have been. For now what I've done is relocated all the images from the BFAHP section to my other site The Neitherworld, but I can't move any part of the forum or chatroom. (Well, I sorta could, such as the images, but it would be a pain to do it. And it wouldn't save much money in the long run if I divert too much bandwidth from The Neitherworld anyways.)
Therefore I am going to be setting up a donation system. What I'll probably do is get an account on Paypal just for NF, separate from my regular Paypal account there. There's a lot of ways to integrate a Paypal button onto a website and onto a vBulletin so I'll start looking into them. As for giving contributers their due, we can either agree that donations will be more or less anonymous, or I can give contributors special status of some sort on the forum. vBulletin does have tools built in for that sort of thing, maybe you've seen that on other vB forums. Sometimes its a one time donation and sometimes it's done through a paid subscription deal. Usually contributors would be the only ones allowed to have say, a custom avatar or something, but I don't want to take that away from the regular members. I could increase the PM box size I guess. Eh. I think for most people the payoff is a special image beneath their name that tells everyone how generous they are.
Or maybe not use that system. I don't especially want people competing through money to look cool on the forum by having a special icon under their name saying that they donated. But, other forums do it. What do you guys think?
Oh - currently the site costs me $35 a month, but we'll have to move to the $45 package if we continue to use the same amount of bandwidth we've been using lately. And over time, we may have to move to the next package. We've already upgraded twice since changing to this server last August.
(And it wouldn't be very helpful to simply start suggesting cheaper servers for us to move to, so don't do that to me. Nor do I at this time want to look at like, dedicated servers...Maybe later though. As you can see it's not like I'm asking for hundreds of dollars a month or anything. Thanks.)