You gotta pay to play.

$20.00 per [b][u]YEAR[/u][/b], Shorty--only $1.66/mo.  [:D]


Please refer to the tacked topic at the top of this forum for a full explanation.

Capitalism!

Please refer to the first half of my post in the other thread where I give a complete explanation that partially answers your question.  I'm assuming I understand what you are asking.  If not, there is another thread that explains more fully, about halfway down, in a post made by HiramRanger, and somewhat, well, actually, substantially, edited by [b]raf[/b].  Your question will be answered in its entirety there, or at least I hope so.  Make sense?  [:D]

Guys, normally on this subject I am very caustic... Right now I'm going to speak sincerely from the heart.

It was so hard to get Juan to accept that this needed to be done. If you want to blame someone, blame me. Sometimes when you care about someone as much as I care about the Avilas you have to risk incurring their wrath to help them.

When Juan lost his job and had no income coming in he was still paying at least $1,500 a month out of pocket to cover the bandwidth. Now maybe this was possible when he had a solid paycheck coming in, but honestly, why should he have EVER been paying out of pocket. Running this place is a full time job in and of itself. My fellows mods and staff give what time we have, and I'm sure it helps free up some time for Juan, but we don't do coding, we don't fix servers when they are down, we don't protect the board from denial of service attacks... That is however what Juan does into the wee hours of the morning. The fact that Michelle allows him to continue to breathe is a miracle in and of itself.

Now I know money is tight. There were times when I couldn't scrape together $20 for something like a Bronze membership... but over time I could and would have found a way if it was important enough. So maybe you skip lunch once a week for a month to pay for a Team membership. Like anything in life we have to prioritize.

I can tell you that there are a lot of current members who are dedicating to seeing others join our ranks and are sponsoring Team memberships for those who can not afford one.

At the risk of being labeled an elitist I am going to offer one this month to a board member who is also a Mason, can demonstrate that he is in good standing with his lodge and can best explain to me the qualities that make for a good man and Mason and how this board embraces these same qualities. Details to follow.

Juan, thank you for remaining my friend while I pushed this structure on you. If anyone has complaints... Bring them to me, don't badger the guy who was going to the poor house trying to please everybody.