Important Our Current Situation

After a day has gone by and some lengthy talks with a few of the staff, we're ready to make an official statement after Red and stevey's departure. It's sad to see core members leave, it's even more disheartening to watch two of the founding members of our community go. They were both a large influence on JustDubs and a huge contributing factor in this sites development. This place will not be the same without them. With that said, we should now move on to discussing the sites financial situation.

Basically, stevey purchased another server until June 6th. At that point it will need to be renewed. But by then adsense will pay out and we'll be good for another month. We can pay someone to help transition from this server to the next but it will cost about 30 euro. Unless someone like @Severus is able to perform the server switch we will have to hire someone stevey knows to move the sites to the new server smoothly. I am not able to make the switch myself. I'm a programmer, I know little about server admin work ( which is why Sev is stepping up and helping me a great deal )

Unfortunately without someone footing the bill this site has to run on adsense and donations. I may be able to donate money but work is tight right now and sadly for the site rent and all that has to come first. Like you all know, we haven't been getting the traffic we need in the last year in order for the site to sustain itself financially through adsense. Because of this, stevey and occasionally Red were making the payments on the server. After the burden of doing so, this is no longer the case. This is where the community comes in. We will need increased traffic or occasional donations in order for this community to continue how it is currently running. A forum can be facilitated through free hosting but in order for the review and streaming sites to continue they will need to be on a server.

If you love this community and want to see it continue, please donate.
If you are able to contribute anything you can make a donation via paypal to [email protected]
You must make donations to this paypal and not the old one because that was owned by either stevey or Red and will no longer be in use. Anything amount helps. If we are to switch to the new server on the 20th we will need to pay the other server admin 30 euros by the 20th. At that point the next adsense payout will keep the server up for another month and a half.

If we get the 30 euros to pay for the server migration to be preformed, we have a month and a half to either increase traffic or have donations pick up so we can make monthly payments to keep this server. Otherwise, without donations, we will be forced to put the streaming site on hold and move the forum and reviews to a free hosting service.

Worst case scenario, Severus is making server wide backups for us, so in the event we have to migrate to a new forum host we can import the db, accounts, posts etc. If this server goes down we can set up domain redirects back to JDR. Then and only then will we work on a more permanent solution.

Now, nothing in life is promised or 100%. Freak situations can happen and backups fail. I'm only speaking from experience with JustDubs. If you have anything important that you need on the forum and you'd like to save, please take this time to do so. We have 8 days for the donation mark to be hit. Use this time wisely everyone.

I have big plans to make this site great. I'm relying on all of you, who have helped make this community so amazing through the years to help keep it going now in its most critical time.

Once more in case anyone missed the paypal email: [email protected]

 

how to JD become so huge?


Years of hard work. A majority of the people who used the site for streaming were stolen by that fake jd.

 

Sent in my donation, its the least I can do. Hope it helps Good luck and cant wait to see what happens with the site. Been with you guys since Oct 2012, before JD went down and have followed you guys since and hate to see it go this place has a wonderful community and I've made a lot of great friends here. I know I haven't been around much myself been busy with things in RL , and handling my RP site.  But I will try to come around more often and help out if I can



Best Wishes

~MissElegentSerenity



Also I did make a suggestion in the suggestion thread a while back as to how to get donations that would be fun and entertaining and people would most likely be willing to donate for the site. You can also  maybe set a goal for a certain amount to donate for a cause like cancer awareness, ASPCA, things like that. I've seen people do it before where they set up donations to a cause and raise tons of money some of which were set aside for the what they needed for cost and the rest donated to that cause. Like say 20% or proceeds will go to the cause and the rest will go towards the site. you can use a higher amount but I would suggest starting off small to begin with and once traffic comes in then you can increase the percentage. People are willing to donate if they know part of their money is going to a good cause. Hope these suggestions might help as well and doing that will also help bring in traffic. People will see that the site is willing to do for others thus more people will be willing to join to help.

 

Unfortunately I am unable to donate. In regards to the traffic issue, it is a rather difficult "catch 22" situation imo. I personally think the best way to increase activity is by significantly improving usability of the forums.

I apologise if this has already been said but I think it may be better to start the process of moving the DTR forums to new forum software (i.e. no longer use Wordpress for the forum). This will hopefully provide a better forum experience and so people will spend more time on the forum and thereby increasing traffic.

 

I am only intervening because you all are thinking in the absolutely wrong directions and you are going to spend time and money spinning your heals.

Spoiler

http://i721.photobucket.com/albums/ww211/yukariyukari_album/Capture132123121_zps473c4124.jpg

Last month, DTR saw 1115 unique users who average 5 pages per visit. 5 pages tells us these are not forum users or they would be visiting a hell of a lot more pages. They are visiting the homepage and the review pages. There are 37 active users in the forums plus about 10 who occasionally post. Everyone has always suggested improvements to the forums to benefit 47 people and not thinking about the other 970 who use other parts of the site.

I did informal polls of people who registered (and stayed long enough to poll.) The majority said they found DTR either through being part of the JD Facebook or a friend shared something from the Facebook that led them to the site. They would stop by occasionally to read the features on the homepage. Eventually they decided to register so they could comment (especially on the puzzles.)

Look at all your ages. You are mostly between 18 and 24 (excepting Maddy and hig.) Young people are not interested in foruming. They are impatient and want an answer right away with social networking like Facebook and twitter. Even the majority of the people using this site are communicating via chat. Forums are a dying breed.

I offered $50 prizes for something as simple as captioning a picture and that was not enough motivation to get people to register.

The Facebook has over 5500 users buy only about 1000 are actively viewing it. To make the whole population see a post, Stevey and I spent over $500 to pay to have the post pushed out. These posts were all advertising DT. At any given time there are about 20 registered users on DT. At any given time, there are about 4 registered users on DTR. DTR was not meant to be the money maker. DT was. Out of curiosity, how many of the 47 active member actually use and support DT? How many use adblockers on both sites?

In conclusion, the forum is not what you should be concerned about. It for the most part does not draw users. The review pages, homepage and streaming are what people are using. You need to think along those lines if you want to increase usage. Have the most current anime available, everything on Facebook needs a link back to the site, write reviews that introduce rare anime that stirs up interest, post provocative things on the homepage, post provocative things on Facebook that get shared...

 

you are going to spend time and money spinning your heals.


Like this hasn't been the case for over a year already.

Based on the survey I did in February, the one that saw over 200 votes, I know where the activity is coming from. I'm trying to be as polite as I can here, thanks, but we got it handled. If all of this was that easy the sites would be paying for themselves already. It's wishful thinking but, if 'ifs and buts were candy and nuts we'd all have a Merry Christmas.' I know you're just trying to help, but it's not your problem anymore.

 

The dilemma isn't what brings in the traffic, the streaming site, FB redirects, optimizing search engine results is a given. It's the way we market and advertise that gets us that traffic. saywut is already doing an investigation into where dtr and dts traffic is coming from. Seeing why little referral searches are coming into the site, optimizing key word descriptions for better search engine results and working on a report which compares DT / DTRs traffic to similar sites to see what they're doing right. We also need to be looking for outlets to advertise.

and like red said, having the newest animes up. Something LARGER sites (subs+dubs) have problems getting around to (sub elitism). We can work with the new release club, find out whats a big show, and upload it.


Uploading is going to slow down now that stevey is gone and I am organizing everything for both sites. The two of us were the top uploaders and the progress is going to drastically suffer because of it.

 

bedheadred wrote:
you are going to spend time and money spinning your heals.

Like this hasn’t been the case for over a year already.

Based on the survey I did in February, the one that saw over 200 votes, I know where the activity is coming from. I’m trying to be as polite as I can here, thanks, but we got it handled. If all of this was that easy the sites would be paying for themselves already. It’s wishful thinking but, if ‘ifs and buts were candy and nuts we’d all have a Merry Christmas.’ I know you’re just trying to help, but it’s not your problem anymore.



And this dear friends is the reason I left the site.
Yeah...good luck.

 

You left because I'm a smart aleck? That's not a very good reason. Good to know something as trivial as a sarcastic comment here and there made you leave, the forumers must be impressed. You should probably stop telling people you left because you're 40, wanna have a life and are tired of working on the site all the time. I'm trying to be cordial about the situation. But the fact of the matter is, you left the site, you left the community, you left us. It's not appropriate to ditch everyone and then come back on the next day trying to tell us how to run the site now. It's very inconsiderate and demeaning to the work we're trying to put in.