• Posted 12/19/2024.
    =====================

    I am still waiting on my developer to finish up on the Classifieds Control Panel so I can use it to encourage members into becoming paying members. Google Adsense has become a real burden on the viewing of this site, but honestly it is the ONLY source of income now that keeps it afloat. I tried offering disabling the ads being viewed by paying members, but apparently that is not enough incentive. Quite frankly, Google Adsense has dropped down to where it barely brings in enough daily to match even a single paid member per day. But it still gets the bills paid. But at what cost?

    So even without the classifieds control panel being complete, I believe I am going to have to disable those Google ads completely and likely disable some options here that have been free since going to the new platform. Like classified ad bumping, member name changes, and anything else I can use to encourage this site to be supported by the members instead of the Google Adsense ads.

    But there is risk involved. I will not pay out of pocket for very long during this last ditch experimental effort. If I find that the membership does not want to support this site with memberships, then I cannot support your being able to post your classified ads here for free. No, I am not intending to start charging for your posting ads here. I will just shut the site down and that will be it. I will be done with FaunaClassifieds. I certainly don't need this, and can live the rest of my life just fine without it. If I see that no one else really wants it to survive neither, then so be it. It goes away and you all can just go elsewhere to advertise your animals and merchandise.

    Not sure when this will take place, and I don't intend to give any further warning concerning the disabling of the Google Adsense. Just as there probably won't be any warning if I decide to close down this site. You will just come here and there will be some sort of message that the site is gone, and you have a nice day.

    I have been trying to make a go of this site for a very long time. And quite frankly, I am just tired of trying. I had hoped that enough people would be willing to help me help you all have a free outlet to offer your stuff for sale. But every year I see less and less people coming to this site, much less supporting it financially. That is fine. I tried. I retired the SerpenCo business about 14 years ago, so retiring out of this business completely is not that big if a step for me, nor will it be especially painful to do. When I was in Thailand, I did not check in here for three weeks. I didn't miss it even a little bit. So if you all want it to remain, it will be in your hands. I really don't care either way.

    =====================
    Some people have indicated that finding the method to contribute is rather difficult. And I have to admit, that it is not all that obvious. So to help, here is a thread to help as a quide. How to become a contributing member of FaunaClassifieds.

    And for the record, I will be shutting down the Google Adsense ads on January 1, 2025.
  • Responding to email notices you receive.
    **************************************************
    In short, DON'T! Email notices are to ONLY alert you of a reply to your private message or your ad on this site. Replying to the email just wastes your time as it goes NOWHERE, and probably pisses off the person you thought you replied to when they think you just ignored them. So instead of complaining to me about your messages not being replied to from this site via email, please READ that email notice that plainly states what you need to do in order to reply to who you are trying to converse with.

Periodic site backups

WebSlave

WebSlave

Maybe seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.
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About every month or so (meaning: whenever I think about it) I will do complete backups of all my sites on my server and download those backups to my local PC for safe keeping. This is a pretty intensive operation on the server, and during the backup itself, databases will be locked in order to capture an image of the data for the backup. So this means posting, replies, private messages, etc. will either seemingly pause for a long time, or perhaps even time out on you. Sometimes even reading threads will be troublesome, as there are tables in the database that get updated during even the read function for a viewer. Sorry about that, but just no way to avoid that from happening to accomplish the backup process.

There is no easy nor convenient way to alert everyone prior to this taking place, but I will say that I normally do this during the weekend when traffic seems slower here. Unfortunately I can't do it late at night, when traffic is even slower, because the process is quite lengthy, and just downloading even the single 255 gb file that is the backup of FaunaClassifieds takes a good amount of time. Even though I have the fastest download service that my ISP offers, what they claim I "could" be getting is really just a pipe dream, as I never get anywhere near that. So I have to try to time is such that I don't need to have it run past 4am when other processes take place on the server that run automatically.

So anyway, I am typing this right now because I intend to start the backup process right after posting this. Because, right now, I am THINKING about it. :)
 
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