Zelaron's 1st anniversary!

Well, the board has been running for 366 days now, so I guess I should have posted it yesterday, but it completely slipped my mind. Either way, we've been through ups and downs with various issues, such as not getting enough members to join, or maybe that we even got hacked by other competing boards. Well, we're still here with the same database we've used from day one, and as we almost have 5,000 members now and a large tonnage of posts and threads, I am honestly going to say that we've been doing really well.

Well, if you'd like to have a flashback, or just to see what Zelaron looked like a long time ago, go to the forum home and select Ocean rather than Synthesis on the style selector drop-down menu, and you might be surprised.

A lot of people have requested to know what it costs to run a board like this. Well, while I have paid a bit extra to assure we'll remain here, I'll list some of the things I've paid for:

Zelaron.com domain - $13.95
Original Hosting - $10 * 12
Diabloforum.com, Starcraftfoum.com and Warcraftforum.com domains - $50
Domain renewal for Zelaron.com (10 years) - $99
Additional server for the whole next year - $500
Advertising at Somethingawful - $29.95
Various things not mentioned already - About $150

So, that is a subtotal of about $963 so far. The reason why I've listed this is because I've noticed that some Zelaron members have started new forums lately, none with too much success so far. I guess it takes a bit of investment and ideas to get things to work out well.

Oh yes, as a small gift, I've decided to increase the limit of ALL of your PM boxes from 120 to 250 messages. I was expecting to give you something far better, but that's all I could offer right now. Just keep looking for new announcements, and you might be pleasantly surprised at some point.

The only bad news I can think of is that a banner is in the plans to make up a bit for the server costs, especially as we are planning to get a fully dedicated server (an easy $120-300 per month) for the board. We're going to charge people to advertise for a month rather than just to use some random banner company who seems to have no sanity involved in their banners at times. The typical, flashing "You won a hog!!!" banners are the last things we want. After the god-awful popups that I would rather die than to see on this board.

Either way, I hope all of enjoy your stay at Zelaron and will remain members for a long time. Quality before quantity!