I’d thought I’d take the opportunity to present something that’s been discussed amongst the chiefs of Battlestar Wiki.

As you may know, we began putting up advertisements on the site to offset hosting and technical costs more than a year ago. In addition to commissions from sales done through our portal at Amazon.com and other fine retailers, we’ve recouped about half our hosting costs per month. And that’s if we’re lucky.

It has always been my personal goal to get the Wiki to a point of self-sufficiency, whereby it doesn’t have to depend on me or anyone else for funding.

I believe that paid memberships are the way to do that.

Basically, it goes like this:

A person pays $10 dollars via Paypal or Amazon’s Honor system. That person sends along their username on the Wiki.

Once payment has been confirmed, the user gets moved to the “paying member”/VIP user level, which allows the Wiki Software to automatically remove the ads before they are even shown. (This only works when the member is logged in, obviously.) This also works for a year, so once the year is up, the VIP access is taken away unless they pay up again an additional $10.

The outline of everything is [[BW:MEMBERSHIP|here]].

Do note that none of this is active yet, but if you want to donate anyway, simply click on the Amazon donation link on the left sidebar. It’s not hard to miss.

Obviously, feedback is welcome. You can leave feedback at our Battlestar Forum, [[BW:CN|the wiki]], or as a response to this blog.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 1:07 am and is filed under Discussions, Fundraising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.