Not sure if I should post the question here, but the maple forum is likely one of the forums that eats up much of the storage ability of this website with so many multiple threads full of photo's! It has been frustrating the past few weeks each morning seeing nothing available other then "we are working on a fix". And it happened last year as well. What about a small annual fee by members to possibly help pay / support a more robust storage system for this website? any thoughts?
One can buy a 1 terabyte sad for less than $100 https://www.amazon.com/1tb-ssd/s?k=1tb+ssd that could be suitable for archiving old forums data. A similar capacity RAID drive, suitable for a server, costs roughly $300 that. Not exactly budget busting. I'm sure that one or more individuals could send UBC charitable donations for this purpose, but UBC would need to add a web transaction capability to bill the credit card of forum posters. Yet another option would be accepting advertising on the site. There are forums, similar to this one, that are supported by Google advertising (though I don't imagine this to be acceptable to the university). IMO, the UBC Botanical Garden needs to budget appropriately to operate these forums or discontinue (certain ones or even all of) them because they have become unaffordable.
@Osoyoung Yes agreed, the fix would be extremely simple and very inexpensive. The big problem is moving thru the bureaucracy of the institution. I believe this forum format is also an older type which is slowly becoming outdated which also makes it harder to run / manage. Without any means of generating income it likely reduces the effort on the part of UBC to maintain the site effectively unless they have a dedicated in house team to manage it. I believe it would only enhance the university if they had this entire site revamped and updated as it would draw both individuals and students alike to become more informed of what UBC botanical garden has to offer. Just my opinion of course!
An annual fee would definitely stop me visiting - even if it was just Can$5 per year, from Britain it would be prohibitively expensive because of bank currency transaction fees (around £90, = Can$150, per transaction, last time I asked at a bank).
A credit card only charges current currency value. If the site had a credit card option for a membership your $5 canadian fee would set you back $2.87 ( british pound) plus likely a 2% credit card transaction fee due to being in a different country then the host site. That is calculated at today's current value.
Hey, I've given money to UBC, (the BC part, haha) so am I off the hook? I agree with @0soyoung , storage is so cheap that it's probably less the money than just shoe-horning it into an existing budget. Or possibly an existing RAID cabinet. @Otto Bjornson I don't disagree that it's not a lot, but as someone who deals with cross-currency transactions all the time, I can offer you a little more insight: the cross-rate (what you see) is neither what it costs to buy or sell a currency, it's the average of the two. And, the less you buy, the more expensive it is. So I might be able to buy 100 grand at 110-ish basis points (hundredths of cents from the cross), but buying a grand would cost maybe 250. One way that CC companies separate you from your cash is by pretending to only charge for the conversion, while giving you a terrible rate, i.e. making it very expensive to buy the currency. That is, current value is whatever they decide it is, at least in US and French law. Same for banks. And at the same time they take a varying amount of "foreign currency fee." I have a card where the fee os 6% (which adds up quickly) and another, made for this sort of transaction, which has no fee and gives a very low conversion cost, because they buy currency in big chunks. Sorry, TMI :)
@emery I totally understand and agree with the currencies and purchasing as we are in Europe often. Always buying Euro's when the value is low compared to our canuck buck. Mind you everyone seems to be going more and more cashless ( especially Holland). Our credit card still only charges the 2% fee over and above the actual foriegn currency in most of Europe, also New Zealand had the same 2% rate as well last year when we visited.
