A Note to the DFS Community

Gentlemen,

I have a few comments about the DFS forum and hope you’ll consider these points.

DFS isn't driven by commercial interests and dysfunctional behavior. Operating a forum is expensive and I didn’t realize that proceeds from the Movember auction are all for charity.


I’m on three forums. DFS, Straight Razor Palace and one for a different hobby. Both SRP and TGO, as I abbreviate them, charge a subscription fee to sell on buy/sell/trade, which DFS doesn’t do.

I just signed up as a merchant of SRP. It is $100 yearly to be a merchant with a single thread and another $50 if you want to be able to do multiple threads. DFS was $20 for multiple threads, only because code had to be written to support multiple threads. I’m not an advertiser on DFS yet, though I can’t imagine that it raises a lot of money.

TGO had to get a new server not too long ago. I don’t recall the cost, though it was $5,000 or $10,000. The owner of TGO is an IT guy who spent many, many hours on the migration. He went live and it took the site down, causing him to have to stay up all night, before going to work at his day job.

The auction I’ve sponsored is 100% for the expenses of DFS. I’m donating time and materials. I realize that this site is mainly safety razor focused and my new business is for straight razors.

In case you missed it in the auction, I’m also offering a badass knife for the safety razor folks. All guys should own a top quality knife. Most likely, any knives you own aren’t as nice as what I’m offering. If we start seeing activity in the auction I’ll explain why.

I just added a post to the auction thread with items such that the starting bid can be reduced to $150. The VG10 Damascus folder is a gentleman’s knife, which to me means that it is comfortable to carry in a pair of slacks.

I can’t help but notice that many people on this site have multiple $100 plus brushes, multiple $100 plus razors and a ten lifetime supply of shaving soap, which is constantly being added to.

My hope is that you’ll share my belief that it is now time to get involved in the auction to support this community that we all love.

Many thanks,

Pete

I'm actually wondering what it costs to have a forum like this.

EFDan, thank you for engaging. I can't address the cost other than to say that there is an awful lot of data and it costs more than you would think.

I can say managing a community this large takes a lot of time and can be frustrating. While it is a labor of love, it still can be a pain, especially when the leadership have specifically chosen not to monetize it.

In my view, an equally important question to the one of the cost to run a site like this, is for each of use to put a dollar amount on the value we receive from DFS. As one small example, there are a tremendous amount of goods being sold on DFS. This is a specialized hobby and you can't sell this stuff on Craigslist.

It wouldn't surprise me if Freddy and Marko are each putting 20 hours a week as moderators. I would like to see each of them get a nice stainless razor and a nice artisan brush each year during the holiday season.

Back when the OneBlade was really hot, Andrew wanted one and was saving money for a good while. It would be nice if the community had given him one, along with a nice brush.

Pete, while I appreciate your kind words, I am not interested in compensation of any kind.

Pete,

First, thanks for trying to help out.

Operating a forum isn't terribly expensive, unless the forum grows to be massive..like millions of posts massive. Even then, the cost is typically when the infrastructure is first laid out - servers, domain names, forum license (if you're not using open source software), custom plugins, site theme, etc., etc... after that, it's usually just maintenance costs, like paying for the server, renewing the domains and such. A lot of stuff that used to cost money is now free: let's encrypt offers free SSL certs & cloudflare offers their CDN, DNS and bot protection for free. Their DNS hosting is one of the best in the business as well.

I guess the most expensive thing not mentioned above is time. There's a lot of time involved in maintaining a forum/website, server, site design, social media, and etc.. For me, I spend thousands of hours each year on the site. Having banner ads on the site is a win:win. 1- it allows a merchant to promote their business on a site that gets over 300k pageviews/month (last I looked). 2- it helps cover my costs to keep the site running without dipping into my own pockets. My theory is that the site needs to maintain itself financially to make it viable for me to maintain it. 3- I'm pretty sure every single merchant who runs an ad on this site is actually active on the site.

I have the numbers in a spreadsheet, but it's almost 3am and I'm heading to bed here soon... I'm going to estimate that the server, plus domain renewals each year runs me ~$200...that's the bottom line costs each year. after that, there's custom theme work, custom plugins, paying to enhance the forum or its infrastructure, etc., etc.. $5,000-$10,000 for a server to host a site is ridiculous, unless someone is factoring in their time and such.

Regarding the oneblade..I could afford to buy it outright (even at its current price), I just prefer to move stuff that I'm not using so it's not wasting space.

**edited to add**.......I'm not in this for the money, nor are any of the mods. I have the technical ability to run and manage servers and websites and it's my way of paying it forward to the shaving community at large!

Maybe in future iterations of the site (possibly in 2019), we'll allow regular users to donate if they wish, but for the time being, we'll be keeping it as it!

I'm going to close this thread for now so it doesn't get out of hand.