Here is the problem. When I started this board I paid the company that hosts it $30 for six months of advertisement free message board hosting. I did not notice in the fine print that we were limited to 120,000 page views in that time.  I paid the money for the first block.

I was looking at some of the control panel functions and noticed that we are at 110 members and 730 messages. The problem comes in that our account shows 90480 page views with a balance of only 29520 left. That means that we have burnt through $23 of our hosting budget in about one month. I started the board on May 24^th and did not publicize it for a couple of days until I had it setup.

I am not sure if the host is counting our page views accurately. It would probably be fairer if they billed us for messages read. Could it be search engines indexing the pages are causing the high page view count ?

Before now I did not asked for donations but, much to his credit, with out being asked CyberHillbilly3 has donated the first $20 to the fund. With another $10 we can purchase the next block of 120,000 views.

Obviously we have to do something. We have a limited set of options.  I have asked the host if better terms can be arranged. They are not flexible.  We are passing the hat. If you can donate it will help to keep this board running. No, I don? get the money. It goes into a pool run buy the host to be applied against the billing for operational costs.

UPDATES: 

July 1st:  Thanks to Cyberhillbilly3, Microron and Nicethong we have the funds to run for another couple of months.   THANKS from all of us for the donation. 

September:  Thanks to more donations from:

         Kevin1178, Thinline, Tdelgado, Thonger and Slinggirl, Showoffmark.

October though December  Wonderful donations from:

      Microron who is donating for the second time !!!!  

     AZCraig and Matt-J  are both heros for SUBSTANTIAL CONTRIBUTIONS.

January 2004  thanks to dayne and pedalpower50 for chipping in.

NOTE:  Donations to the board are listed in the donation section and anyone can examine the account to see where we are in terms of funds.  If you wish to donate and don't want you email address listed then go to your profile and change un-check the e-mail visibility check box to make your email address hidden.  (Profile button from the menu at the top right.)  You can also select to hide your profile but this is not recomended.