Village14 is an all-volunteer community run operation. There is no staff, there is no office. While all the posts, comments, moderation, and April Fools foolishness are all donated, it does take some cash to keep the site running – primarily for hosting services and tech support.
We’ve just kicked off a $1500 GoFundMe campaign for Village14. If you are a regular reader please consider make a donation, big or small, so we can keep Village14 running for the next year.
Many thanks to all our regular contributors, to our impassioned commenters, and to our silent readers. We need and value you all … but now we need your $$
Donate here
p.s. If you’d prefer, you can also make a check out to Village14 and mail it to Jerry Reilly, 12 Spring St, Newton 02464
Thanks V14 for keeping up a lively discussion and broadcasting important updates.
How much does one have to contribute to get uncensored posting privileges? :-)
@Matt Lai – I’m not sure. I’d just suggest throwing more and more and more money and we’ll tell you if you get there ;-)
We need more affordable home pages
@Rick Frank – :-)
Rick Franck at the buzzer for the win
Some of the funds will be used to change our “404” error pages to “40B” pages.
Jerry I am genuinely confused here – There are still ads on village 14, so what’s going on? You say there are no more ads and village 14 needs money, but I see plenty of ads when I log on… something doesn’t add up here??
Sorry for the confusion Peter W. Here’s a quick history/summary.
For the first 7 or 8 years of Village14’s existence Jon Shubow, an old colleague and friend of Greg’s from his Tab days agreed to host the site for free via his company SerpCom. He did that for many years and dealt with all of the regular tech issues that come up along the way. During that whole time we never paid SerpCom anything for hosting or other services but we were more than happy to have them run any ads and keep any proceeds as a gesture of gratitude on our part.
About a year ago SerpCom finally said that they would have to begin charging us for hosting/tech support – not at all an unreasonable request. We raised money via donations last March to pay for the site for this past year.
We’re now raising money to pay for the hosting for the coming year.
Now for the ads … some interesting details.
* Ads are running on V14 just as they always have
* The sale/management/ and proceeds for those ads is entirely with SerpCom.
* Now that we are paying our own way, we’re guessing that there’s no reason we need to continue running ads if we choose not to.
* Up until recently we haven’t really thought much about it and were happy enough if Serpcom were to earn a few $$ from V14 ads after the many years they carried us.
* Recently a few issues around ads have surfaced. Ads with overt political overtones (e.g NRA) have been hosted on the site and we have no input into that. Also, the site has been running quite a bit more slowly lately and perhaps ad serving is one of the culprits.
* We haven’t yet but I suspect we will talk to SerpCom soon about dropping ads from the site.
* We’re planning to get the V14 regulars together for a planning Zoom call in the coming weeks and that’s one of the issues we’ll be talking about and hope to resolve.
So ads for now, maybe no ads in the future, stay tuned.
Many thanks to all of you who donated so generously. We had hope to raise $1500 but we in fact raised $2225 which is great news. That will keep Village14 running for the next year and a half or more.
Two other notes:
* As of now, there are no longer ads being hosted on Village14.
* Many folks have noticed that in recent months the site has slowed down significantly. Our site administrator is aware of the issue, has some leads on what may be causing the slow down, and is hoping to make some significant improvements in the not-too-distant future.
Thanks Jerry for handling all of this.
What Marti just said.