I’m not quite sure why we never did this before … likely for the same reason that I’m still not holding my breath for it to work. Either way, if for some really strange reason you’d like to help us buy ramen while we’re living in our darkened squalor, hacking mercelessly and living on a steady stream of mountain dew, please feel free to click the following link and donate whatever you’d like to the Cause.

The reason this came about has to do with the forum signups. Its not that we’re running out of server space, or bandwidth. It comes down to a competition of time allocation. As with most startups I’m sure, the time we have is very precious. It’s gotten to the point now that every few days I find myself faced with 25 to 30 forum requests waiting in the queue to be setup. If we were running on a dedicated setup it’d be easy, but unfortunately to setup these free forums I have to go through dreamhost’s slow and bloated control panel, as well as manually do the SVN export of the latest code base. It ends up taking 5 to 6 minutes if I’m babysitting it, longer if I try to go off and do other things. Multiply that by 25, ah, carry the 1… um… yeah it takes a while. Plus its such monotonously boring work that I just can’t stand it.

So, we made the decision to institute a very small setup fee. Firstly to hopefully curb the number of forum requests, but also to supplement our pathetic Adsense revenue. It’s kind of a bittersweet decision, because on one hand you want your little project to grow and spread and get as many people using it as possible — but on the other, when the mundane management of these free forums begins to take up a significant chunk of your day, is it really worth it? I’m literally having to stop hacking on MF itself, just to take care of these hosted forums. So do you try to keep it growing, or do you work on getting it done?

In the mean time I hope this is a happy medium. Hopefully it will drag in a bit of revenue, possibly weed out the forum requesters who earnestly want a forum they’re going to promote and use, as well as (maybe?) raise the image of MF just a little. I mean, Abercrombie can charge $55 for their crappy tshirts, so obviously that model works pretty well.

As with everything we do though, its an experiment. We stumble along and try to make the best decisions, learn from our mistakes, and vow to get ‘em tomorrow.