is your pm box full?
there's legal issues with collecting money from non-business units. collecting money opens me up to warranty issues, refunds, liability, and not to mention a whole slew of tax accounting that I don't care to throw recked into for a couple hundred bucks a year.
As a free service, you basically have no rights. It is provided as-is, where-is, if I want to.
As a 'paying customer', suddenly you do have rights. And any 'loss of use' or other infringements can be litigated.
so, that means I need to have lawyer draw up wording that would protect me from any loss of use (such as a server fail) or any other case where someone may feel 'ripped off'. If I sell a 'lifetime' membership, what if you out live me? does that mean you have a legal right to attach to my estate? maybe. it creates doors.
The site IS profitable. It's no where near what it used to bring in at the height of the hobby and site use (2005-2008 were some nice years), but with our new cheaper server, the rev coming in covers the expenses going out, and gives me a few bucks for coffee here and there.
Until that status quo changes, direct payments are simply not required.
If you want to support HS, the best things to do are:
- tell your local shop about the site and engage them to consider advertising with us.
- tell your favorite parts vendor about us when you order from them where you heard about them (here of course)
- Put a link on your facebook/etc page to an article/thread on the board to promote us.
- don't spam our link... it just makes us look bad for your mis-doings
- but do consider cross-linking from other forums/etc with RELEVANT help to a thread... ie, hondasite.ws/thread/brakes you read... and post a link there to a brake thread on our site that helps the OP.
- tell your friends
- represent us at local meets. talk about how cool we are at autoX.... at the Friday night car show.... at the strip... 'brand recognition'
- take pics of your events and attach them here to the multimedia section to get people to come here to look at pictures instead of facebook/pisca/etc.
- make some DIY articles. take pics. walk others through what you did. CONTENT keeps people coming. Our site is a bit stale these days since I got out of the scene.... we have hardly any K-series stuff. no modern swap info, etc etc.