[DocJohn]

There's been some speculation that we will become a paid-membership only community. There is no truth to this speculation -- what you see here today will always be free. We have no current plans to run ads on the site, either, because it doesn't really cost us anything to keep these forums running.

Others have wondered why OBT has so many problems running forum software while we don't... I honestly don't know. We did make him the offer to run/host OBT when it went down and I heard nothing back from him. (Getting vBulletin up and running literally takes about 15 minutes if you're not doing an import -- which he didn't do.)

I think the problem comes in that OBT decided to purchase their own server and so you have to work with the hardware you have, even if it breaks. In the hosting world, all hardware is commodity and virtually the same, so if one of our servers goes down, we just swap out hard drives into a working server and we can be back online in a few hours. This is why I lease all of our servers, so if one goes bad, I get a new one in a few hours.

Once running, software like this requires very little maintenance. We run a script once a week to clean up the database and we monitor stuff, but it really pretty much takes care of itself. However, as a community gets large (greater than 20,000 members, I'd say), some little issues can turn into bigger issues, since it all runs on a database. The key is to keep active tabs on things and put monitors in place to let you know things are going wrong *before* things become catastrophic.

In 11 years, I've never had a community be down for more than a day (including running the world's largest online mental health community for 4 years) and I've never charged for any community.

John