LES update, where we are, what is next and more changes.

AnthonySmith

I guess this is going to cause a lot of division, but here goes.

This is a stream from my head, this post is overdue so I will write it raw as it comes to me and get the jumbled mess out of my head.

This topic is not going to get a consensus; I already know this and accept it, some people want everything to remain the same; some want only the changes they want; some want to donate in some way, some want to donate in other ways, some dont see why this place needs funding; some don't care about adverts; some want specific types of adverts; and insert 20 other versions of all of those opinions and then dome just dont care either way.

That makes it literally impossible to please everyone, so I am just accepting I cannot please everyone, but I am being as sensitive as possible to all of this while also acknowledging that some people are going to feel more strongly than others.

The original idea was to use google ads and allow people to opt in, and always show them to none logged in users.

The issue with that:

• People opted in and then complained anyway.
• Google is a horrible system to use, has massive overreach and is overcomplicated for this platform in terms of compliance.
• For the last X years, LES has had no statistics running at all, so I had no idea if it was going to yield $0.01 or $1000 per month so I found everything out at the same time.
• Frankly, I don't like having Google integrated in anyway; I am really going off Google as a company in general. I don't think I am alone in this.

The current situation:

• I have managed to reduce the "lights on" costs to around $10 per month for a 2GB OVH VPS on top of that there is domain and email costs so lets call it around $150 per year, not alot really in the scheme of things.
• LES is now stable in terms of speed dips, backed up regularly (provider managed) , all possible caching is now activated at multiple levels and there is even a dedicated worker to catch all the AI scraper traffic so it never impacts the main forum speed priority.
• Vanilla has been brought up to date for php 8.4 and is running on mariadb 11.x and on debian thanks.
• I have done a few rounds of feedback before I touched anything, I appreciate sometimes people dont know what they want until they know what they dont want, and I did what I thought was a balanced mix of things to improve the flow of the forum, give the community more powers of self modderation and got you more involved in decision making while letting you have an active role in long term direction thought down voting, up voting that makes a difference, you can ignore pople, I have reduced friction on new members joining and hosts getting badges.
• The price limits are still removed, and will be reviewed early 2027, I just feel that in 2026 its too arbitrary and to exclusionary to set $7 limits.
• now I have had stats running on LES for a while via CloudFlare, the numbers are not great, from memory, around 7 years ago we were at around 300k - 500k page views per month. Today that's closer to 170k

What it took to get here and what is next in the short term:

• I have probably spent about $500 of my own money and put in around 200 hours of my own time bringing things to where we are now.
• The blog is coming back, some of you will remember the glory days of the LET front page, I have adapted vanilla to essentially allow WordPress-style blogposts while still using the vanilla engine, so https://lowendspirit.com/blog will start getting updates soon. I will likley be taking full personal control over that and it will be fairly active.
• I will be adding squares to the right-hand menu, there will never be agreement, adblockers exist, everyone can make their own choice. I will be doing it differently, everything will be managed in house and via the forum, similar to the karma store, you will be able to buy any amount of squares, you can use them for anything you want (anything appropriate) for 70 karma or $7, month, and you can combine them into a maximum of 2x2, other options will be 1x1 2x1 1x2 and you can use karma or pay to have them blank. Squares are open to all members not just hosts, Karma points will be accepted as payment as that means you have been of value to the community and forum, static images, 2 frames maximum, no flashing.
• Small Graphical signatures will be available (smaller than the current 3 lines of text) as alt images for mobile view.
• I have a ton of low-hanging fruit in terms of optimisation to do both on the cloudflare side and the general backend side to increase pagespeed scores etc to make the entire forum more appealing to search engines etc so I will work on that often.
• I need to continue to look for opportunities to evolve the offer here.
• I will be starting to remove providers, so we have a more accurate picture. I will do a mass PM to all hosts, and give them 30 days to login and explain to new push/lease of life/situation, any that don't log in will become regular members again.
• I am looking into adding more product/search capability for hosts for the providers section, something like serverhunter but not stepping on serverhunter's toes, although frankly I am not sure that is really much use these days it has been abused, and results are never accurate, frustratingly.

Why do you need any money?:

• A lot of reasons, not limited to, redundancy, offsite backups, my time is not free to me, never mind in general, stability and being able to make a better offer to the users, paid content, opening up opportunities to evolve the LES offer.
• More immediately, I want to start literally buying down offers for the community; I have already spoken to a few hosts about this, I want to be able to buy down hardware costs up front in various ways so that they can make better offers for you, ensuring LES users get 64GB ram instead of 32GB Ram or massive group buy discounts that are backed and guranteed.
• I want to start a good host scheme, something other hosts and I have talked about for a very long time, so people have a trust mark of sorts that has some accountability attached to it; this won't be free or cheap to put in place.
• I need to get more active members in here; frankly, the numbers are not on a healthy trend I see this as a last ditch effort.
• I want to help fund some of the free offers that are already here and increase that e.g. paying some of @Neoon 's and @msatt invoices for more exotic locations etc which then comes back to the community.
• I dont need a lot, but a working budget would be good.

What is the long term?

• That very much depends on how things go over the next year or so for LES, I promise I am going to continue to try as hard as I can to push this place, I appreciate some people just think it is fine how it is, but how it is, is going down in all metrics, so if you are one of those people perhaps you do not understand that what you are saying is essentially "It's fine, let it die slowly"
• My health, I have an appointment in 5 days that will dictate how the rest of my year goes, I did say and take on board the suggestion I should not hold all the keys and agreed to keeping a adminsitrator in the loop here in case anything happens to me; it's well above a 0 chance for me at this stage that I dont get better. with that said (sorry he is genuinley not expecting this) I would like to ask @mikho if he would consider being the saftey net and be an admin again, simply because he knows everything he needs to know, we have known each other well for 15+ years now and I would trust him with my private keys, if I vanish or just take a massive health dip I know he will do what is needed, if @mikho is not interested I understand I will make the offer open to all current staff roles.
• I do not plan to stick around as an administartor/owner long term, I will do what I need to do to get things turned around and step back, or reach a point where I accept I am not hitting the goals I need to hit and maybe I am not the right person, and I will step aside and let someone else try, likely from the existing Mod/Admin team.

So that's everything I can think of right now. Feel free to ask any questions; please accept this in the good spirit it is intended; writing is not my strong point, apparently, nor is getting my intent across a lot of the time, so please don't read between lines; you won't find anything.

poei

Please take care of your health. Everything else is trivial.

I vote for @ehab as our next overlord.

slowservers

I'm sorry to hear about your health. I hope that the news is positive!

At this point in my life, family keeps running into more and more health issues. I miss my younger years when I felt invincible, and no one had any health concerns...

I am definitely interested in buying an ad square (or two) from you!

msatt

Wow - that was quite a read.... Best of luck with your results, I have been through a traumatic health issue so know how draining it can be.
Genuinely appreciate your extremely generous suggestion @AnthonySmith for FOSSVPS, but I would be much happier making LES grow, 170K visits is too low.
At present I am paying for a couple of servers and what I would happily do would be to make one of them exclusive to LES members, as it is mine the Open Source rules could be waived if beneficial to LES (nothing expected in return).
I can't speak for our generous donors - @Alexhost, @Hosteroid and @st-hostings but we can 'evolve' as required.
Getting visitor numbers back up will certainly be a challenge as everyone just wants an app so that would be an area I would be focusing on you have already done all the major work.
Once again good luck and best wishes.
Mike

SocksAreComfortable

I hope that your health visit goes well, in whatever form that takes.

As for LES, it's a forum it'll live on one way or another (or not, one day). To me, the most important thing is having a person/team with a specific vision who are trying to make it better and work towards that vision. Users can decide to stay or not, but design-by-committee never works in any field, so I'd rather have a set of competent, passionate folks running the show regardless!

MichaelCee

Best wishes to your health.

Two points:

• You should always have the admin role even if somebody else becomes primary admin. It just fits.
• Give me squares!!!

AnthonySmith

@SocksAreComfortable said:
I hope that your health visit goes well, in whatever form that takes.

As for LES, it's a forum it'll live on one way or another (or not, one day). To me, the most important thing is having a person/team with a specific vision who are trying to make it better and work towards that vision. Users can decide to stay or not, but design-by-committee never works in any field, so I'd rather have a set of competent, passionate folks running the show regardless!

A horse by committee is a camel with wheels

ehab

health and family member comes first

take care of your self

all this is just small part of life ... what matters is what is around you

go and listen to

Not_Oles

@AnthonySmith

In the present moment's LES community discussion of what will happen with LES going forward, we also need to remember everything which happened in the past to bring LES to its current happy place! We know the details, but please let me mention especially the ethics and decency of the basic motivations behind LES.

So here is one thank-you for the past, another for the present, and a third for the future of LES!

Thanks also to our wonderful LES staff and to all our wonderful LESbians!

I wish you the best for your upcoming health appointment! No worries! In the long, long term, everything will be okay!

I want to see you back after your appointment! Looking forward!

Tom

jaden

I concur with others, your health is top priority. I hope the upcoming appointment goes well.

I like giving users the ability to buy out ad space and leave it blank. Genius idea!