At the beginning of October I began asking new members to contribute to the site in the form of a paid annual subscription. The reason for this is because our growing subscriber base has put quite a bit of strain on the server, sometimes even resulting in the entire site being brought down by the hosts because of the overhead on the server. I need to move this site to its own dedicated server with the hosting company, but such a move comes with a considerable financial overhead, one that is not being met by apparel or membership sales.
I realise that we are living in tough times and paying to visit a website is not going to appeal to many people when they can belong to other sites for free. So, as of 1 November I have made the paid subscriptions optional again. However, I have also decided to restrict functionality for free members to try and alleviate the load on the server and of course encourage the purchase of a paid membership.
To read more about what has changed for non-paying members, please click
here.
Over the coming weeks I will be adding new functionality to the forum, specifically for those of you who have so kindly purchased memberships and apparel in support of the site. One of these improvements is going to be a personal blogging area right within Nikongear itself. This would be in operation already, but the author of the modification has changed the beta program significantly in the past couple of days, so I will be waiting for him to release the new version before going ahead with the installation. Other improvements will see members being able to create draft posts that can be posted at a later time, easier insertion of images from your Nikongear gallery and many other new features.
For now I'd really like to say thank you to those of you who continue to support the site financially.
During the downtime this morning I have been able to do some long needed house cleaning on the forums. You will notice that there are some missing forums, and things have changed somewhat. Here's a brief overview of what's different:
1.
Travelogues was incorporated into the
Places board.
2. The
D3 and
D300 boards were incorporated into the
Nikon SLR's board.
3.
Producer Zone was incorporated into
General Discussion.
4. Board categories for
The Gear and
The Talk were merged into a single category now called
Gear & General Discussions.
5. Non-public boards for Club Members, moderators and the POTW Committee were moved to the bottom of the index.
6. Support & Suggestions were merged into one board.
I hope that doesn't confuse you guys too much, but I'm sure you'll find the site looks a bit more organised now.
