Transparency On The Future of ATS

a reply to: Bigburgh

Are you saying combined were close? I don't have any interest of running the site only maintaining it as probably the last place of true free speech and uncensored topical discussion

The current owners do a great job balancing this, maintaining neutrality and all that

How much more than 500k?

a reply to: JBurns

No,
Some of us are in pittsburgh, new castle, hermitage...

Edit: the site might go, the people are still here.

How about a rolling archive of past posts.... after a year old they go to archive, and let the USERS prune out the useful info by way of their search query.

Once an old thread is "recovered" from the archive once or twice, it gets moved to the live host for quick reference. Users may see a delay at first, but functionally ATS is preserved with minimal hosting.
Drop the pic posters too, and allow outside images.

Set up a donation button, should help a bit with costs.

If it's 100% going to die and you know in advance, set up something like a community Discord server where we can all retire together and argue still.

a reply to: Bigburgh

ATS local edition my garage drinking beer

I U2Ued seeker. Anybody else you know of? Can't believe I'm even talking about this, my wife will kill me but I'll pull the trigger on my end on very short notice

I am working numbers

This is so upsetting, ATS has been such an important place for me...community and friendship or as close as I'm personally able to get to it...something I have difficulty cultivating in real life for whatever reasons. It feels like a loss of an arm, something I've relied upon for multiple years.

I'm so sorry it's come to this for everyone involved from the ownership, staff, and membership. Jesus this is really hitting me in the chest, I guess I've come to rely on ATS, BTS more that I realized.

Thank you, Bill, Mark, Stephen and the rest of the crew.

Peace

a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

It sounds to me like the situation can be rectified if the desire was there.

I could certainly be wrong

Um. Wow. This saddens me a great deal. This is the one place I could come and be with people who felt as I felt, asked the same questions I asked, and all while feeling some kind of validation that maybe I wasn't crazy - maybe it's the world that's nuts.
Yes, for the past few years it seems to have become a different kind of monster. But I still visit daily, multiple times a day, and though I lurk more than anything else these days, I still enjoy the forums I choose to frequent.
I'll keep showing up on the daily, and hope for the best outcome for this site and everyone who loves it.

Maybe if your site didn’t redirect us to malicious sites trying to steal our info for fraud we wouldn’t block your ad revenue. Hell, you guys never made this site secure, so complain all you want about the users, but if it wasn’t for the users, you wouldn’t have any content to make money on in the first place.

I say thank you to all the users that have made this site great. It’s to bad the owners never cared about it as much as the rest of us.

originally posted by: Xabi87
Set up a donation button, should help a bit with costs.

21 pages in and still getting posts like this.

Turn on the laptop, first site i go to?

ATS. Every single time, every single day. Without fail.


Damn what a loss this will be..

Maybe we should open an ATS meth lab, it worked for Walter White.

It's a collector's karma. Delete the database. Press the button now.
Deleting closed accounts is a no-brainer.
Let me delete my alcoholic rants at will. The search box doesnt work anyway.
Not even I can find my old stuff. No one else will ever read it except a prosecutor trying to make a domestic terrorist out of me one day.
An average user participates in a chat and moves on.
Change the format. Let people archive their stuff on their own HDD.
They wont

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

Didn’t work to well for DeLorean

I kept hoping for a Pendulum Swing back to more diversity.

Doesn't look like that's gonna happen.

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus

Maybe we should open an ATS meth lab, it worked for Walter White.

A video with Walter/SO ???

a reply to: JBurns

PM'ng yinz...

originally posted by: Aallanon
Didn’t work to well for DeLorean

Psst! That wasn't meth!

There's some aspects afforded to membership that could be done away with and save some major bank in the process. Such as the apparently no-limit to photo collective upload storage amounts. Max it to say, 1 meg of storage size at any given time if you have to, but if you trim THAT "bonus feature" aggressively, you reduce a lot of those terabytes significantly. Oh, and don't forget to remind people how to resize and trim that image footprint further on their own. People have no idea how much can be saved just by sticking with a 500 or 600 pixel width or length. They do not have to take up the entire post, folks.

Make certain things into membership perks, such as custom avatar field font colors, subscriptions even, an actual avatar perk (FULL sized as we do now with the invisible icon layer to see big avvies) Separate them into two icon categories, so no paying members have to futz with the invisible layer anymore. Big hassle-free one for the paying folks, dinky for those who don't. Leave the little block size one we make transparent as it is -- don't want to pay, ok, but this is all you get. Or maybe reduce it's size and make the footprint smaller. Every little bit counts for server space freeing up.

Or hang it up and make sure you have a couple of subreddits locked and loaded to take the site's place -- one ATS/conspiracy, the other BTS/off-topics. It's the best "I fold" option out there to keep members connected.

There's options, and ways to keep this place going (just requires a restricting to a more basic forum with what we're used to being tied to paid memberships or even via paid rolling a la cart perk-by-perk stuff) There's also options to toss some roses on the dirt and go to the next park to play in, Reddit being the most obvious.