LemonFool - our tentative plans for the future

[Clariman]

Firstly, on behalf of Stooz and I, we'd like to say a big "thank you" for your encouragement, enthusiasm and offers of support. Support has ranged from practical to financial and just about anything else. As we head towards 1000 registered users, Stooz and I wanted to give you a heads up on our thinking about the site - our tentative plans.

The plans are tentative. At the beginning of last week, Stooz and I had no thoughts of developing another website together and only emailed each other a couple of times year to say “hi”. My first SMS to Stooz at 3.38PM on Thursday said "Hi Stooz. Are you still on this number? TMF boards are closing down. I'm retiring soon. I can feel a project coming on???? Clariman". And so started a conversation that came up with the name Lemonfool (I'll take credit/blame for that) and a website that went live around midnight on the same day (Stooz can take all the credit for that!). Since then we've done our best to keep pace with the volume of user registrations and the loads of great suggestions and questions. Stooz and I had our first chat this morning so here is what we have agreed so far.

Objectives/Drivers
Our primary objective is shared. We want to create a forum that allows the Fool community to remain intact and grow. Somewhere that allows friendships and conversations to continue with a community spirit.

Funding
The setup and initial running costs are small and have been more than covered by the limited number of ads which Stooz has put on the site. However, we have had 2 short outages due to the volume of database connections and this is down to the fact that we are using shared server capacity in the cloud. We are looking at dedicated server options to remove this limitation. We may carry on for a few days 'as is' to see if the volumes drop and can be supported. If not, then we will upgrade our hosting package. If that is necessary we might need some form of funding. Options may include any of:

• Donations (Paypal or Just Giving)
• Crowd-funding
• Further advertising
• Small subscription. The positive aspect of subs is that it provides long term funding, unlike donations. The downsides are (a) the administration required and (b) the barrier to getting new users. Therefore, if we do go down this route it won't be for a while and it is likely to be only voluntary

Ownership of Site
Although we both absolutely want this to be a community driven site, the current thinking is that Stooz and I would own it. Do we want to make any money from it? It certainly isn't the primary objective, but if it did earn something at some point, we wouldn't be upset about it - and hope you wouldn't be either.

Moderation of Discussion
To maintain the quality and community atmosphere, we both think that the boards need moderating. Many of you have already volunteered. We will be seeking board moderators - ideally 2 for each board?

Boards that will be supported
TMF was primarily a finance site but had loads of very interesting sub-communities having intelligent discussions about all sorts of things. We would like to continue this tradition. The last thing we want to do is to clutter up the site with 100s of boards that are little used, so we will have more generic boards in some cases e.g. "The Sports Bar" where all sports can be discussed and one Property board for the time being rather than 2 or 3. If the volume of posts merits the creation of sub-forums then we can do that in the future. Please make your requests on the existing threads and we will add them as required.

Legacy TMF Data
We have no plans to load any old TMF data into Lemonfool, but would happily link to any legitimate archive or repository of TMF boards. The reasons for this are many.

Board functions
We will continue to work on adding in useful functions. Recs are high up on my list but Stooz says that a developer is still busy working on that function. Please keep up the many suggestions. As you can see, we (particularly Stooz) has been addressing them already.

That's probably enough for now.

Thanks again
Clariman and Stooz

[NomoneyNohoney]

Well, can I at least give a Virtual Rec for a timely, informative and encouraging update?
You guys have done sterling work, and I look forward to Fooling around again as the site settles down.

[sg31]

Clariman & Stooz, Thanks for the update, I'm very pleased with what you guys have achieved so far. Well done.

[DeBriele]

What you have done in a matter of hours is simply outstanding!

If you do go the donation route, you may wish to consider using BT MyDonate; much lower on charges than JustG, VirginG or PayPal

Thanks again for the new future

DB

[staffordian]

I just want to echo what others have said, I'm so impressed by what you've achieved in a day or two.

It's a bit disappointing to me that there are some expressing dissatisfaction, though constructive criticism is obviously to be encouraged, of course.

To those who are not happy I say this.

TMF was going for the best part of twenty years and folk were still trying to get changes and improvements.

Lemon was up and working in the best part of twenty hours, so please give them a little more time to achieve perfection

Staffordian

[toofast2live]

A million thanks for your work. Nothing is free so set up some sort of donation process. £1 a month from 1,000 users would be £12,000 a year!

[Dod1010]

As someone to whom the workings of my computer is a continual mystery, for you to have got this up and running so quickly and so efficiently (as far as I can see) is amazing. Your dedication and enthusiasm are wonderful and if you ever make any money from the site good luck to you. As someone said, a modest monthly sub seems OK, although ads are a more painless way of supporting the site. I often wondered what was in it for TMF, although I suppose they hoped that there would be a spin off for their commercial operations.

[Clariman]

A million thanks for your work. Nothing is free so set up some sort of donation process. £1 a month from 1,000 users would be £12,000 a year!

Thanks toofast2live

Stooz and I did discuss asking for donations now, while there is a lot of goodwill around. However, our costs are low and additional funding not needed. While we are not against making money from the site, it is not really what we are about. We felt it would be a bit exploitative to ask for money when it was not needed. That could change quite quickly if we need to upgrade our hosting package substantially!

Clariman

[andycowl]

We may carry on for a few days 'as is' to see if the volumes drop and can be supported.

I think that is an excellent, pragmatic decision. It's relatively early days for Lemon Fool and obviously traffic and interest is currently high as the exodus from TMF hits. However, it would be prudent to wait and see what 'steady state' usage looks like. No need to run off and shell out money just because the MySQL user connection limit was breached a couple of times (for a few minutes). There may well more more traffic spikes (e.g. when TMF actually closes) in the future.

Fantastic work BTW. Thanks to all involved. It really does feel like a community. Also, I can actually use the site on my tablet and phone which is a great advantage of this brave, new world.

[Sunnypad]

massively impressed and really grateful this has been done so fast - amazing work!

Re funding, I don't mind ads at all, nor do I mind if those in charge here make money from the site.
S

[seekingbalance]

Great start guys, The wonders of modern tech combined with the desire to do something good can get us anywhere.

My input would be to avoid subscription as it is bound to massively reduce lurkers at least some would have become posters.

Donations and ads is the better way to go - and if technically possible maybe the ability to turn off ads in return for a payment, which has worked for me on several apps I use.

Recs, best of, and favourite boards is essential, so great that you are looking at this.

A permanent link to the Wayback machine and a drive for people to add key posts, both single and full thread (this is important).

Moderation is vital, but needs to be sensible. Report a post is helpful for the mods.

I am happy to help in any way I can - recently retired, past IT and forum creation and moderation.

SB

[SentientBean]

First and foremost, a HUGE thank you to Clariman & Co for building a sea-worthy lifeboat and getting it in the water so quickly. Exceptional effort!

My wife & I first became TMF members back in '99 after reading something in one of the papers and then going to a TMF talk in London on shares for newbie retail investors.

We used the forums a lot over the first decade, branching - as most did - well beyond finance and into the legendary Blasted Computer and LOOTs etc.

We were shocked to hear of the demise of the forums, and even whilst we haven't been regular users these past few years, it's like hearing about the closure of a local library or landmark. You always wanted to know it was there if you needed it!

So now, we're registered with LemonFool, will make more of an effort to participate - as TMF UK really was one of the last bastions of civilised discourse on the web - and MORE THAN HAPPY to pay for it, by whatever method is deemed most operable.

Good luck guys.

SB

[DiamondEcho]

Moderation of Discussion
To maintain the quality and community atmosphere, we both think that the boards need moderating. Many of you have already volunteered. We will be seeking board moderators - ideally 2 for each board?

I think together with Mods it can be an idea to have 'spotters'. The kind of Fools who've migrated here might be assumed to value the quality of the discussion, and so be willing to help maintain it. But there can also be a tendency if you read spam/abuse to imagine that someone else will already have reported it, and hence do nothing oneself. So such informal spotters, who might be invited to become such, will take the initiative in reporting anything they believe on balance probably breaches the rules. Then the mods adjudicate. IME on this type of forum [the coding/format], when used elsewhere, if a user tries to report a post that has already been reported the 'Report a post' function will tell you 'This post has already been reported', so there is no duplication of effort.

IME it being seen that spammers/abusers get hit fast is important. I.e. much junk is pre-empted by it being obvious that posting such is simply time wasted. A kind of virtual 'broken windows' approach? So I've seen boards where the tide of junk flows in from late Friday night and through the weekend, as the spammers expect the mods to mostly be off-duty over that period. This is where 'spotters' can be useful, they report the junk, and any mod who pops in even briefly during this time has a list of highlighted trouble from trusted spotters and can clean it up in minutes. This works especially well where [in this case] say the forum is UK based, but the contributors are spread and posting world-wide through the 24/7 cycle. I.e. If all the Mods happen to be UK-based, then seek to appoint some spotters out in Asia-Pac, and also the US etc. Appoint spotters across all boards [and don't give them gongs nor identify them!], according to the volume and time-zone of that volume. Obviously on big boards it will merit more, on smaller ones a spotter can cover several boards.

[CatcheeMonkee]

I'd be perfectly happy to buy my Amazon goods via their Affiliate Scheme ads / links on here if you guys can make it work.

[tjh290633]

Moderation of Discussion
To maintain the quality and community atmosphere, we both think that the boards need moderating. Many of you have already volunteered. We will be seeking board moderators - ideally 2 for each board?

I've done some moderation, albeit on lightly trafficked forums.

If I can be of any help, let me know.

TJH

[nigelpm]

All sounds excellent.

I'd have thought you should be able to make it work financially with affiliate links, donations and help from the posters here.

Also agree with others that any kind of subscription (whilst the regulars would happily pay it) WILL put people off so avoid until you absolutely have to.

[kodokan]

I'm in the US, -5h GMT, and could help with the sort of non-standard timezone moderating or spotting that DiamondEcho describes. It would make the vast amount of time I spend on the internet feel useful

[19kHz]

However, we have had 2 short outages due to the volume of database connections and this is down to the fact that we are using shared server capacity in the cloud. We are looking at dedicated server options to remove this limitation.

I'm not sure if you missed my email and my post on TMF but I could offer a dedicated resilient server cluster available to Lemon Fool under a not-for-profit arrangement. Plenty of server and bandwidth resource available if required.

If you'd like to know more about whether the environment would suit drop me a line.

19k.

[stooz]

Thanks for the offer. I will bear it in mind.

[Generali]

I'm in the US, -5h GMT, and could help with the sort of non-standard timezone moderating or spotting that DiamondEcho describes. It would make the vast amount of time I spend on the internet feel useful

I'm in Aus and would similarly be happy to moderate on my timezone.