Feedback on Subscriptions vs Advertisements

[Guide]

The RRDi used to have a sister site relationship with the Rosacea Forum (RF), since one of our board members founded RF. David Pascoe, owner of Rosacea Support(RS), took over RF a while back. For many, many years, the RRDi and RF never had any advertisements like RS has done for years. Recently, in the past month or so, David has chosen to put advertisements on RF to help pay the bills since hosting a forum like RF is an expensive endeavor. As David points out in his reasons why he did this in this thread, the RRDi is in a similar situation and need donations to keep paying the bills which as everyone has noticed their bills are inflating and price increases on hosting are also feeling the crunch. The Invision Community platform which we have chosen to use since 2006 increased their hosting price this year by over 500%. The RRDi has chosen to resolve this with switching to a subscription based website. To access 95% of our rosacea data will require a minimum of at least $2 for one month's access or $3 for three months access. We hope this is the solution. The other option is to do as David has done with RF and put advertisements all over the website while browsing for rosacea data in the hope that these advertisements generate enough revenue to keep the site going. A third option is to have some rich donor sponsor the RRDi to keep the lights on. We still allow free posting here in our guest forum, so you can post a question about rosacea or make a comment about rosacea in our guest forum without registering and can hide behind a cryptic display name and no one ever knows who you are. Or you can donate a small donation either $2 or $3 and gain access to a wealth of rosacea data as a subscribed member. The RRDi would like some feedback in our decision to switch to a subscription based member forum. Why not find the REPLY TO THE TOPIC button and hide yourself behind a cryptic display name of your choice and tell us what you think?