Board Status

Damon-

First off - many thanks. I am super happy you stepped in.

You've probably already thought of this, but I'll come out and suggest consolidation of hosting. We can keep the catsailor.com domain, etc. but keeping commonly maintained accounts on multiple hosts is redundant. It would save a huge amount of money to bring them together.

I am more than happy to assist either with my checkbook or with time.

Thanks, I hope I haven't taken on too much. I haven't even had time to really think about what happens going forward. My first priority was to make sure the site didn't go away.

It would have shut down completely on March 8th if nothing had been done.

Since I got full control about 36 hours ago I've spent most of those hours working on the site to find out what is there, cleaning up the spam, and fixing or removing (literally thousands) of broken links and old code that was lurking behind the scenes. I've contacted the UBB Threads people but haven't heard back to find out if this forum software has an up to date license so it can be upgraded.

Since the OnlineMarineStore.com is no more I removed hundreds of links and banners to it that just led to

not found

pages.

As far as I could tell all the advertisements on this site were for the OnlineMarineStore.com, if anyone knows about advertisers please let me know, that would be a big help. Ultimately for the site to pay for itself I'll need direct advertisers. I've put on a few Google Adsense ads for now but frankly the traffic on this site is extremely low right now, so I don't expect much from them.

It's understandable that the traffic was low with Rick's death, winter time, and the massive spam attack, but pleas spread the word to regulars that may not by visiting to stop by and check things out.

Well yes, that is the plan, in fact it's a requirement. I've got until March 8th, maybe a few more days, because I paid the current server and email provider their past due monthly fees. They initially told me it would take $820 for them to give access (even with permission from the family) but they did negotiate it down to $432 which I paid them yesterday.

Anyway, hello to all the Catsailor.com folks who may not know me that well. I've posted a message on the front page of this site as well as a PayPal donate button. (Not a tax deductible donation, just helping out because you want to.)

If anyone is wondering what I've received so far, it's $10 via PayPal (Thanks Terry!) and two promised checks from Mike Fahle and northsea_junkie.

For any folks outside the USA that want to use wire transfer, please send me an email to damon at thebeachcats dot com and I'll supply anything you need.

I don't know what the hosting requirements for the site are, but I have some free space, bandwidth, and database on my webhost. As long as it functions and doesn't exceed my plan's limits, I'd be willing to host catsailor.com.

Regards,
Eric

Thanks for the offer, somewhere in my last long post I forgot to mention that I have web servers available. While I don't sell hosting to the public I do host my own clients sites as well as TheBeachcats.com .

A site like this really can use a lot of resources and takes a lot of maintenance to keep running properly.

That is why I use a dedicated server to run TheBeachcats.com and Rick had this site on a $200 per month Cloud Server (Virtual Server). These aren't like small business

menu

sites where a 1,000 of them can run on one box.

Damon thx for keeping everything running!
Have you also gotten access to the Catsailor Facebook account, it has a few thousand members which could help drive traffic.

Hi Damon,
Awesome work, it would be great if you could keep catsailor.com going. I mostly frequent the beachcats site but have also greatly benefitted from following various discussions about cats here. I just sent you my little contribution so that you have some peace of mind going forward.
Happy Sailing!
Marek

Hey Damon,

Contribution coming...

As a thought for a fund raiser our local school has a Platinum Club Gold Club, Silver Club for PTA donations that will list out who the donors are for each tier. Funny how people get competitive when it come to giving money..let alone sailing boats.

Maybe list out those that give a certain amount to keep this thing going...

Ulysses Grant is on his way to Memphis Guru....

Thanks Damon

how do we do the paypal thing?

And I vote for a review board set up that will

fine

every political (or blatantly non-sailing) post $0.10 payable to the

fund

to keep the site alive.

A few of those threads could have generated quite a bit of dough... And a fee to post drivel might keep some of it down...

For PayPal, if you are a PayPal user you can just send money to
damon
at
thebeachcats
dot
com

If not, you can use a credit card directly by using the PayPay donation button on the front page of Catsailor.com. .

I'll be doing some forum reorganization to make things easier and very soon you will see only sailing on the sailing forums. 🙂

I see some of the changes already. Thanks!

Is there a

For Sale/Trade

section? So people can BUY AN AD? <img src="<>/smile.gif" alt="smile" title="smile" height="15" width="15" />

I'm Back!!!

Glad to see my old boss at BayShore Solutions was able to help and very glad to see Damon was able to get the site turned over

How come you couldn't get in Andrew?

For now the buy/sell classifieds are the classifieds on TheBeachcats.com here.
http://www.thebeachcats.com/classifieds/

And you don't even have to pay to place an ad there right now.

To welcome all the Catsailor.com regulars I've set all the ads to the low price of FREE during March. (regular $10 for boats and $5 for parts)

So try them out, clear out those extra boats and parts lying around.

And I haven't had time to deal with it yet, but I will be looking for business sponsors and banner advertisers for both sites.

Right now I only have an adrate sheet for TheBeachcats.com, see it here.
http://www.thebeachcats.com/adrates.htm

Welcome back and thanks very much for all your help last week. I haven't been able to figure out how to connect you back with your old posts, but it might be possible.

Short answer: I am willing to cut my nose off to spite my face.
Long answer: I had issues with this website's SPAM policy (continuing to spam me despite repeated attempts to unsubscribe). This is my profession (email marketing and dev), I take it (a little too) seriously.

After all communications and passive methods failed, I took a stand and insisted he remove my account

Glad to help (and save the wealth of knowledge this site has)!
Don't forget i want 1/2 the profits !!! (jk)

Don't worry or work too hard about connecting my old posts, I have an aggressive plan to regain TOP POSTER status in 4 weeks time - Anyone need a Cheap Jersey? I started a company you may have seen on this site ... <img src="<>/grin.gif" alt="grin" title="grin" height="15" width="15" />

deleted

As you revamp the forum, are you planning to give some attribution to Rick White, as the originator of the forum?

It could be called

Rick White's Catamaran Sailor.

(Sorta like Dave Clark's Rockin' Eve.) Or maybe a history page about Rick? Other ideas, folks?

Please let there still be room in a a dark corner for non sailing discussions, funny facts etc. (no advertisement).

Like the

test

thread.

Otherwise I would miss these moments of excitement and wondering about the world outside sailing.
Which is observed by and recorded by sailors

Yes, I have in mind naming the main general sailing forum something like
Rick White Memorial Forum

Although that sounds too formal and kind of sad.

I'll take suggestions on that.

Maybe we can have a poll when the dust settles, having some trouble getting the site moved because of several really large topics that go back years and contain all kinds of (bad) html. (I'm looking at you test forum) 😉

Yes, Since you asked so nicely (and made a major cash donation <img src="<>/smile.gif" alt="smile" title="smile" height="15" width="15" /> )

I'm running into a problem with the really gigantic topics, might have to lock some of them and let new ones be started in the

Politics Religion, and Trolling

forum.

How about calling it,

Rick White's Racing Forum

with a short bio of Rick stuck to the top post for a general forum, then all the different racing class forums under that?

It's under the

Politics, Religion and Trolling

thread. Enjoy!

Yes, the

test

thread has some real gems in it. The

Drill

and

Media

threads... not so much.

Maybe there's folks out there with the expertise to answer, but could this forum be set up as a 501(c)(3) in order to help generate donations (as this would be a tax-deduction for USA folk)?

not that it matters much in my case, but some daddy-warbucks type (Ding) may see the benefit when dropping those large steamer trunks of cash at your door.

Prefaced by IANAL,

I've considered this over the years with TheBeachcats.com but having been involved in a number of non-profits, you need to be bigger than beachcat sailing for it to help. People are going to help or they aren't. Now if you are big enough to get corporate donations, they do favor registered non-profits for the tax and publicity factors.