The future of Pattayatalk - An open discussion

[Regyai 415]

Monthly raffle?

 

 

Squeeze a freebie from local businesses in exchange for the glowing mention here (worst case haggle a discounted payment)

 

 

Then raffle it

[short 215]

Frosty, I can and will definitely help through either sponsorship, advertising or donation. I am back in town after 1 March, lets get together and talk about it then.

 

Pete, I have to ask the question. Sir, why would you want PattayaTalk? Whenever I have been in town, Pattaya Beer Garden was or near standing room only. Sir, what is your motivation?

[frostfire 1,279]

 

Pete, I have to ask the question. Sir, why would you want PattayaTalk? Whenever I have been in town, Pattaya Beer Garden was or near standing room only. Sir, what is your motivation?

 

Short, Pattayapete started Pattayatalk. He owned FLB Bar before Martin bought it (from him). I would say his motivation is fairly clear.

[frostfire 1,279]

Frosty

I mod on here as well as another much larger UK site. I am also a member on many different sites, some are free, some are by voluntary donations and some by subscription. All work in their own way and it will depend on how much revenue per member you need to generate. From my point of view I would steer away from ads as they can be bloody annoying when they appear. Sponsorship by a bar? Well, it would be the personality of the bar that draws people into the bar and conversely onto the site. But if the bar owner changes (it's been known to happen in Pattaya!) then what happens?

If you have a voluntary donation, then you can have a specific 'paid member's area or some other enhancement to their access. However, if you have a subscription only you lean towards pushing people to other (less worthy!) free sites.

Are you only looking for $150 per month? Is it that difficult to raise that per month?

 

happy to chat further about it.

 

KM

 

One thing I will be clear on: While we may well add a section only visible to premium members - people who are known personally by multiple other members and bought in that way - I would not be for making that membership dependent on a fee. Whatever solution I come up with, it will not be mandatory and people that do not contribute will always be able to see all the content, provided they qualify for access to that section. I do not want this to become a pay to use site at any level. That was one of Martin's key visions for this site, and I will not change that.

 

When I was in town in December I suggested to Larry (Soi7) that his bar buy Pattayatalk and use it to promote his bar the same way that Pete and Martin used it to promote FLB. At that point in time I knew that Martin was ill but I didn't know that he was terminally ill. Larry dismissed the idea at the time because he was not comfortable with Martin's style.

 

Larry is currently working part time at the bar and that would give him time to moderate the board from his condo. With frosty continuing to be the #1 admin for the board, I think this would help keep Pattayatalk running for a long time.

 

 

 

 

 

(Respects to Martin)

 

At the current time I am not considering selling the site outright. I would not want this forum to change in any significant way, and selling it would only risk that happening. The expense of running it is not very high - if I cannot find a way for the forum to pay for itself, I will simply continue to fund it out of my own pocket, as I have done for the last year and more and as Martin did for several years before that since FLB closed.

 

 

Get involved with something like Google Ads and the next thing you know there'll be problems with "inappropriate content" upsetting their advertisers and they'll effectively end up dictating what we can and can't post (remind anyone of another board?)

 

That would be the end of this board as we know it.

 

LordFlash's suggestion is certainly worthy of further consideration.

 

I must admit I did not think about that at all. You (and the others who mentioned it) are likely spot on with this. This type of info is exactly why I posted this discussion. So google ads are out - at least for the time being.

 

This website is more - or could be more - than just a forum. When you visit www.pattayatalk.com you are taken to a very very old and outdated website outside the forum. That website is in desperate need of a major overhaul. I have a lot of ideas on what to do with it, but have not put a whole lot of thought in to it yet. I do plan to change that in the coming months. I would like to see a much broader portal with access to current information, webcams, local hotel reviews, emergency information and contacts, and just about anything else a tourist may need for his trip over here - as well as other more detailed information on the nightlife available here, etc.

 

Another thought I had but I never took live because I was worried about legal ramifications is a website for reviewing and rating the girls of pattaya, much like any number of similar websites in the US and UK. I actually worked on it years ago, and came very close to finishing it - and in fact, the website is up now - has been for many years, but I never advertised it and its not been used. Kinda funny too - I have noticed that there are many technically smart people on forums like this - and for years while the FLB Webcam was running there was a huge clue to the existence of that website there in plain site, but nobody noticed it. haha. Anyway, that idea is still on my mind, but the worries are still there as well, so that one is tabled for now. Still something like that would be of great value to all the members here, not only for its use as intended, but as a means of browsing girls and knowing where they work so you can go see them - as opposed to a thread where pictures of favorite stunners are, but you have no idea how to contact them (lol). I know I used to view such threads and make a game with martin of going bar hopping to see if we could find a particular girl... and while that was greatly enjoyable, it usually did not pan out. (tho it did in a few cases).

 

Thanks for your frankness, Frosty.

 

Before FLB closed, effectively, FLB paid for PT as it was a promotion for the business. (If I have that wrong, please correct me.)

 

Would an option be to link the board to another business? I suppose it would have to be a bar but the forum could entice people to the bar for, say, monthly get-togethers.

 

 

P.S.

PL is NOT a good example of how that would work!! But there are factors at play there which stop it happening.

 

Again, I do not want to limit the board by letting a single sponsor have full run of the content or otherwise limit it in any way. I would of course consider placing banners up for businesses for a small monthly or yearly fee. That is likely what will have to happen. Martin did that back in the day. We never discussed that, but I assume it was paying the bills back then, so it should be feasible now. I will look in to that.

 

 

As an aside, I will go ahead and put up a donation banner. I will make another post as well and link the banner to that post, as I have some things to say to people before they make a donation - to make it clear that Pattayatalk is free to use with no restrictions, and while donations are greatly appreciated they are by no means required at all.

[Butch 3,456]

Hi frosty

 

I was going to PM this but thought it might be an idea to bounce around. I own a few domain names and have done for years (will PM the names of them), now I know you probably don't want to go building up another website, but if there is anything you can do with them as a way of covering the costs then I'd be happy to help. With reference to your above post hopefully they might be of some use.

 

Although I've been a member since days 1, I've been meaning to ask what the "SSG Members" were, are they people who donated in the past?.

 

Lastly, many of us have contacts in Pattaya, friends who own businesses and associates from way back. Perhaps it wouldn't hurt to have a package that could be presented to them and call in a few favours re advertising.

 

check your PM's frosty.

[frostfire 1,279]

I have hundreds of domains myself. Tho I use them in conjunction with other tangible asset businesses and clients - not monetizing them like I am trying to do here.

[frostfire 1,279]

And I don't see a PM from you. You may not have sent it yet. Im quick on the ball today

[short 215]

 

Short, Pattayapete started Pattayatalk. He owned FLB Bar before Martin bought it (from him). I would say his motivation is fairly clear.

 

Yes, I knew that, but Pete hasn't updated his Beergarden website since 2012 (feel free to correct me Pete) and I take that as a sign he doesn't need or want more internet presence for the beer garden than he already has.

 

Now due to the huge success he's been having with the Beer Garden, he probably has some very deep pockets and may just be feeling generous. That is a motivation I would understand.

[izzyg 37]

I admit that I do not know much about server hosting, but $150 per month sounds a bit expensive. A friend is running a simple forum on $35 per year.

 

I use the paid version of the Tapatalk app. That is supposed to give some money to each forum I visit.

[MeGoDanceNow 4,281]

How about selling merch on the site? A lot of YouTubers who get demonetized do that. You could sell a whole bunch of swag, like Pattaya Talk polo shirts, ball caps, fridge magnets, private-label Viagra, that sort of thing

Edited February 26, 2018 by MeGoDanceNow

[lanzalad 128]

I admit that I do not know much about server hosting, but $150 per month sounds a bit expensive. A friend is running a simple forum on $35 per year.

 

I use the paid version of the Tapatalk app. That is supposed to give some money to each forum I visit.

 

 

Yes I was thinking the same after working on IPS and running several forums over the last few years.

 

I did ask a few questions regarding the disk size required for the uploads folder and database. the rest is minimal ...

 

lets say you would need 100GB then a server of 160GB will do the trick with WHM/Cpanel a VPS is ideal for forums as you have root access.

 

The 3.4.9 version on the forum is not supported and doesn't carry any license fee so my guess is it can be done from 20 to 40 USD per month depending on the hosting company your decide to use.

 

Heres a few:-

 

 

Edited February 26, 2018 by lanzalad

[frostfire 1,279]

 

 

Yes I was thinking the same after working on IPS and running several forums over the last few years.

 

I did ask a few questions regarding the disk size required for the uploads folder and database. the rest is minimal ...

 

lets say you would need 100GB then a server of 160GB will do the trick with WHM/Cpanel a VPS is ideal for forums as you have root access.

 

The 3.4.9 version on the forum is not supported and doesn't carry any license fee so my guess is it can be done from 20 to 40 USD per month depending on the hosting company your decide to use.

 

Heres a few:-

 

pt.png

 

tmd.png

 

 

So ya... where to start on this one lol.

 

Those are not dedicated server hosting plans. Those are website hosting plans.

 

2 problems with that. First off, between the database and the photos (many of which may be able to be deleted martin said, but I have no idea which ones or how to tell), we are using about 1.25TB right now. But the most important aspect of hosting is control. If we host this on a "website hosting" service, they control everything. We have no access to do anything special or set special permissions, etc. Further, the moment some asshat complains that we have pornographic content or "prostitution related material", they cancel the account and we lose the current database etc. Second I do not know of any website hosting plan that allows for 1TB+ - tho I may be wrong about that now since my firsthand knowledge of that is years old. Lastly, bandwidth. We use a absolute fuck-ton of bandwidth. The usual maximum bandwidth allotment for a shared hosting server account is about 5GB/mo. We use at least 50x that amount. As stated in other posts, I am not totally sure what our bandwidth use is at the moment, but I do know an approx. range - somewhere between 300GB and 1TB per month. Shared hosting just does not offer that type of thing.

 

So, a dedicated server it is. And yes, sure, there are dedicated servers running in unknown datacenters in eastern europe where you can get a dedicated machine for $20 a month... so ya, I could lower costs that way. But I won't do that, even if it costs me out of my own pocket. Its a weak option with more negatives than I can list, not the least of which is at any time they could shut down with no notice and all of our data is lost. Cheap hosting services are a dime a dozen, and they go out of business as fast as they start up. Think of them like a beer bar in new plaza. Sure there are a few that have been there for years, but every time you go there's a new one and no sign whatever of the one it replaced. I would never put a server I control in to a situation like that, no matter the content.

 

As for tapitalk, no they do not pay forum owners - at least that I know of. That is something I can check in to - perhaps Martin just did not mention it.

[lanzalad 128]

All of the above i listed are VPS or Dedicated and none shared

 

Ok then we have three kinds of hosting.

 

Shared - VPS - Dedicated

 

The shared server is no good at all so that leaves you with VPS and Dedicated Server.

 

You need Root Access to the server and WHM/CPanel both of the above will give you this in the package.

 

I do believe you bandwidth is between 25GB and 50GB per month, now i know your going to say i'm wrong and for that reason i've done my figures base on site traffic and uploads against over forums i manage.

 

I would go as far to say your forum will not be higher than this forum which i run in the UK and has daily uploads from members everyday...

 

 

You may want to install a plugin that will resize all the attachments to screen size and i.e display size ... and not 2000 plus by 2000 pixels

 

i've set one forum to resize all attachments prior to uploading to the server and then i did a resize on every attachment.

 

This saved loads of space...

 

For the eastern European servers i didn't even talk about them nor would i use them... there's much better options.

Edited February 26, 2018 by lanzalad

[frostfire 1,279]

You are right in what it *should* be using. But its not. One of my jobs will be to find out why, eventually.

 

Martin thinks that some of the photos' links got their way in to some other websites over the years. I suspect he is correct. In other words, other forums/sites use images with a URL on this website to save themselves bandwidth. We had a discussion about it some time back, but he could not find a way to isolate that. If this was a windows server I could do it in a minute. I will fix that eventually.

 

But this whole part of the discussion is pretty much moot - I've already purchased a very good server, so getting one elsewhere would be a step backward, not forward.

 

And lastly for the record, I would never put an important website on a shared host of any kind, and rarely on a VPS, unless the traffic was quite small. I know quite a bit about VPSs as I own a fairly large VPS hosting company myself :) (its a niche company, but currently leases several hundred VPSs). I know very well what they can do and what they can't - and a database heavy app like this forum would chug along like a snail under one of them, since there is never enough RAM for proper database caching.

[Butch 3,456]

Hi

Is the Agoda referral worthwhile? Are there more or better paying referral sites that can perhaps can come on board?.

[frostfire 1,279]

Hi

Is the Agoda referral worthwhile? Are there more or better paying referral sites that can perhaps can come on board?.

 

I've tried unsuccessfully to sign up for 2 of them over the last couple days - both were "down". After doing research I decided against agoda, since many people seem to be complaining that they skim commissions and obfuscate click to conversion statistics. Over the coming weeks I will be looking for things like that tho.

[Big_Brian 179]

Thanks for this Frosty. Like many I would miss this forum, it was only the second one I joined - after the long-defunct Yellowboard - and is still the main one for me.

 

I wish I could enter fully into this discussion, but a lot of it is just acronyms to me - my computer knowledge is firmly at the user stage.

 

Sponsors sounds like the way to go though, if forthcoming. I can see how non-competing businesses like (say) PBG, Le Pub & Pandoras - whose business models don't really overlap - could benefit from a banner add + a regular forum meet. Especially the meet, some of us can drink!

[frostfire 1,279]

So just for those interested, I spent most of the day yesterday between learning linux and setting up a test server where I can install the latest IPB and try to upgrade pattayatalk and fix any issues (likely have to re-do the skin).

 

In the process of that, I found the commands I needed to see request metadata and found that there were a number of files being streamed constantly from outside our forum. One was a very large video. After a bit of trial and error, I enacted protections on them (and now all files on the server) that will prevent them from being abused by other websites. This resulted in a HUGE... and I mean absolutely massive decrease in bandwidth and CPU usage on the server, and the pages load noticeably faster now. I suspect that will drop the cost of the server dramatically.

 

One of the videos is a porn video of some sort that must have been posted on a old (circa 2009) post that had been deleted, because I cannot find reference to it anywhere in our database (but it was in the right folder to have been a upload at some point, and its write time was in 2009). Anyway, I deleted that one. That was being streamed by a large number of porn websites as referrers, so I suspect that's where most of the bandwidth was going.

 

Anyway - some good news. Let me know if you see a noticeable page load time difference.

[atlas2 4,329]

Brilliant work Frostfire.

 

 

After reading your post I'm understanding how little I know about this thing I'm typing on.......I'm guessing 'frostfire' is some computer joke that's been going over my head for yonks.

[frostfire 1,279]

Brilliant work Frostfire.

 

 

After reading your post I'm understanding how little I know about this thing I'm typing on.......I'm guessing 'frostfire' is some computer joke that's been going over my head for yonks.

 

No. Its a gaming thing.

 

Frostfire was my very first gaming character name from when I was about 13. I don't even remember what game to be honest - I know it was AD&D but no idea what module/adventure. Back then my nickname began as "Frosty", and even my family used it. To this day I have RL friends that use only that name - and likely several that do not even know my real name lol. That was all... crap, 30 years ago now.

[atlas2 4,329]

Sorry assumed something to do with fire walls.........

[thinkingallowed 39]

So just for those interested, I spent most of the day yesterday between learning linux and setting up a test server where I can install the latest IPB and try to upgrade pattayatalk and fix any issues (likely have to re-do the skin).

 

In the process of that, I found the commands I needed to see request metadata and found that there were a number of files being streamed constantly from outside our forum. One was a very large video. After a bit of trial and error, I enacted protections on them (and now all files on the server) that will prevent them from being abused by other websites. This resulted in a HUGE... and I mean absolutely massive decrease in bandwidth and CPU usage on the server, and the pages load noticeably faster now. I suspect that will drop the cost of the server dramatically.

 

One of the videos is a porn video of some sort that must have been posted on a old (circa 2009) post that had been deleted, because I cannot find reference to it anywhere in our database (but it was in the right folder to have been a upload at some point, and its write time was in 2009). Anyway, I deleted that one. That was being streamed by a large number of porn websites as referrers, so I suspect that's where most of the bandwidth was going.

 

Anyway - some good news. Let me know if you see a noticeable page load time difference.

Well done.

 

To be honest I have been a little surprised by the costs quoted on here and P-Live for running a forum especially with so few posts being made these days.

Is part of the reason the large database of old posts and photos? If it is then both these fora plus Secrets have very little new members and those eight year old trip reports really are doing nothing but gathering dust, clogging up the system and costing money. Would a stripped down forum be a way to go possibly? Is there an easy and free place members can put photos and link to the forum when doing trip reports etc? I'm pretty sure that 99% of threads never get read again a month after their last post. Maybe have forum awards at the end of each year where excellent threads can be nominated for being saved for the future and then a good tidy up of the rest.

 

As I've posted elsewhere Talk, Live and Secrets have just about enough good posters between them to have a pretty good forum unfortunately you'd have the idiots from each all in one place and that would be too much for me to take.