The Camaro Club (UK)

Many thanks for the donations guys! Some explanations below to some good points that were brought up:

Firstly, Oddball & AndrewC, your stickers are in the post and should be with you tomorrow
@The Seer did you want a sticker also? Send me your address and i'll pop one in the post on Monday for you.
Yes, unfortunately it was all very last minute, i tried sending a mass mail but i don't think it got through to everyone. Problem with mass mail is that the ip address can get flagged as spam when loads of emails are suddenly fired off, so it looks like that happened as some people got a mail but others didn't.

With the website address, had to change it and unfortunately they are put in quarantine for 90 days after expiry, so i can't buy the old one and setup a redirect until later this month. Unfortunately on top of that google takes many weeks to get key words to show up results for new website to the algorithms it uses (based on how many people type a key word then clink a link, analysed over time). It seems to be on the first page of results now on google when you search camaro club uk which is a good start, but unfortunately took a while to get here. Good to see some of the long term members finding their way back
Good question and it's about £72 per year for hosting plus domain renewal which is about £7 (but it's normally for 2 years, so it's more like £3.50 per year). £80 per year should cover the cost, as the extra few £ goes towards postage for stickers. We're a little over half way which is really great, thank you everyone who has made a contribution so far, it's all adding up I have been planning on adding a function to the site that shows something like "donator" to a persons profile as i think it's a nice way of showing thanks. It would be nice to get some extra cash flow of course for things like a club flag (we have one, i'm owed about £100 from it but i'm sure over time some of the costs will come back, main thing is to ensure that the website stays online as that's the priority) and for anything else we may need to invest in (not quite sure what that would be, maybe things like paying for club stands at places, but i'm sure we'll work that out when the time comes).

One of things with the new host we have is that we have unlimited bandwidth which is great as before we kept running into issues with going over the limit and moving up to the next package was going to be well over £100, and even that had limits. We also had a really small amount of storage with the old site, which also meant we couldn't host images on here. That was causing some issues too, as it was hassle to upload to a 3rd party and link the files etc. The other issues is say in 5 years, the account you have closes down because you cancel it or whatever, then all the images here get lost. It's driven me nuts trying to find a picture of a particular part and you finally find it on some random forum and it says "see pic below" and it just says "this account no longer exists". So the good thing with hosting images on here, is that won't happen. So with this new host, we have a much larger storage quota, so we can upload pics and hopefully that will encourage more people to share images as it's easier. I'm going to raise the limit to 3mb per file, as currently it's 2.5mb. This should be large enough to accept most pics. The only issue is when it comes to a a nice SLR camera which tend to take 7-11 mb pics. The issue is that say in future we need to move host again, we could be bringing a large database with us and the could cause issues. It also slows the page loading down if you open a thread with 10x 8mb pictures in it (80mb). With more people using phones too, it could quickly eat away at data allowances. There are free sites out there that you upload an image to and it resizes it to 2-3mb so that could help in those cases.

You may have also noticed google ad's on the page. I added this so that we had an additional source of income. Ideally, it would generate enough revenue that donations aren't required in future. Only time will tell on that one. You get 2 types of revenue... views and clicks. Views are basically any time an ad loads on a page, but you get barely anything for them. I think it works out to about 1p per 100 views. The difference comes from clicks, where you get anywhere between 10p and 40p per click. It's based on quality i.e how long did you stay on the clicked page and did you click on anything else on that page. Now the thing is, when reading google's t&c's it says 2 things - 1 is that the owner of the ad account can't click on ads on their own pages (you're logged into google in the background, so it sees if you click your own stuff and it counts as a violation). The other thing is that as an owner of an ad sense account, you can't ask for people to click on ads, or force people to (i.e. click here to go to the next page, which launches an ad). So now if you read between the lines there, i can't ask anyone to click on ads, so i'm not asking But if you see an interesting ad and think it might be worth checking it out, then by all means and your own free will, feel free to check it out, but i'm definitely not asking anyone to do so If you did find something interesting, i wouldn't rush and click away one after another, otherwise it would be seen as odd that suddenly all these clicks appear from different people. Possibly you may see something interesting every couple of weeks, or maybe even once a month, that you wanted to check out.

Hope that helps a bit, happy for anymore questions!

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How to post pics: When writing a message, scroll down and use the "attach file" option. Where possible, a photo sharing service can be used such as Flickr, Imgur etc. The image location (usually ending in .jpg) can be copy and pasted between the ][ brackets that appear when you click the 'Img' button (you can find this button at the top of the message box).

How to post youtube vids: Click on the 'youtubeHD' button at the top of the message box and in the middle of the ][ brackets that just appeared, copy and paste everything from the youtube web address that appears after the = sign i.e if this is the url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2cNqaPSHv0 just copy "K2cNqaPSHv0").

Thanks for the explanation on the costs and details on the better hosting package.
Donation will be on its way and don't worry about the sticker !

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See the sort of stuff we get up to here https://www.facebook.com/colin.fox.359# ... tos_albums
Its only a hobby that keeps us off the street !!