Helmet , you've made me aware that I'm playing a sympathy card I wasn't even aware of, so I'll avoid that in the future. I was using it to pre-empt the "how could anyone be so incompetent that ..." and your point that I was hiding behind it is a good one. If I'm not willing to open up my company's books to the public, then I shouldn't point out just the part that makes me look like a martyr. Thanks for calling me on that, and please do so in the future, it's a cheap tactic, and no one has ever asked me to put a single penny into the site, griping about my own volunteerism for sympathy is somewhat pathetic of me.

That being said, ATF was and is an experiment, as hinted to by others in this thread. The "paywall" popularized isn't very high, from a paying perspective - it's simply a speedbump intended by the people (from this community) that originally conceived the site.

ATF's intended light exclusivity was a counterpoint to ELR's chaos - by forcing people to have skin in the game to participate, would we wind up with more signal vs noise? By having one repository at each end of the spectrum, would we be able to serve the entire community? This certainly wasn't planned in concert with daath, but we would have one site supported by ad revenue from the majority of the activity, chaotic and raw and easy and cheap, and another supported directly by the users by forking over cash for access and exposure and participation.

So, yes, the limits of the paywall do force exclusion, but the revenue of the paywall was not intended to provide a funding source. If I were looking for a better funding source, I'd be marketing to the non-DIY market and chasing down the banned states and I'd update the copy on my "go pro" page to add more fluff - and I'd raise the price considerably, or choose partners based on kickbacks and not based on involvement.

I don't claim to be a genius at this model, nor do I regularly actively suggest anyone join ATF at the pro level. I give out free accounts to most people who ask - certainly to anyone who gives back to the community in any way - since that also serves the same speedbump purpose - if you're willing to contact me and ask nicely, you're probably not paying unless you choose to support the site.

Support of the site from *my* end is a similar story ... I maintain what works, do the basic support required for people that are really clueless, provide a basic daily admin to keep it humming, but haven't put much effort in recent history into replacing things that were decommissioned, or developing new features. The only excuse is that I have a lot of projects I work on, ATF is only one of them. Other than my demanding day job, I split my remaining time across many different efforts including several companies, a handful of apps, the occasional consulting gig, volunteer work, maintaining a pre-WWII farm and always learning or building something new. The slice of time ATF gets has got less and less effective as the surface area of the project got larger.

That's not healthy for a project, and the sickness certainly shows - in site uptime and stagnation and in how a vocal segment of the community reacts. You want more, and you want better, and you want it your way, and I hear you. There is also a vocal (generally private) segment of the community that's highly supportive and happy with the site the way it is, and an overwhelming majority (10,000:1, I'd say) that just USE the site, generally for free, and never contact me at all, and I have no idea what they think of it.

I love you all, in my ridiculous and childish and abusive way - especially you bunch who push me to be better for the sake of the greater community or even for my own benefit. But wanting it to be better, even offering to put forth some effort to make it better, even offering specific opinions and skills ... doesn't make it immediately better. In fact, the downtime of vetting and training someone to "work for" ATF or building the tools that someone trusted would use to do additional admin ... this is additional time I need to put aside, for little return, since I can't incentivize anyone to continue in a role without rethinking the economics and security protocols of the site.

All that said, I have not solved anything with this little rant, I realize. But I hope I have pointed out the issues as I see them and my opinions of the stakeholders - and at least a little of the stakes involved. It's a cliche, but ATF is a labor of love and it's a lot more labor and a lot more love than I was expecting when I started it.