Who's making the money then?...
Someone must be making the money/profit....
If that's not a business then what is?
What it is is an amazing thing. You can believe it or not, but I will tell you what bf.c is: it is one man's passion.
Notice, please, that there is no advertizing on bf.c, none. No banners, no popups, no ads on the sides, none.
Bf.c is one of the acknowledged "big boards" on the Internet. It is currently the 306th most active discussion forum site on the internet according to
www.big-boards.com. From a potential advertising standpoint, this is an enormously-valuable piece of cyber realestate. Spark could literally make a good fraction of a million bucks a year selling ad space on bf.c. And yet year after year after year he declines that opportunity.
Yet operating the 306th most active discussion forum site on the internet is not cheap. The servers that are needed to keep this place serving up the page rate that it does with hundreds of users online at any given time, 24/7, cost serious money. And administering them costs serious time and money too. I'm sure that just the electric bill to keep this place online is about $600 per year.
And that is to say noting of bandwidth.
Even the software used to run this place is purchased and requires license fees.
The income from sales of memberships covers some of those expenses. But I know that Spark ends up out-of-pocket on this little hobby project of his every year. And he pays. Why? Because he wants this place to be here. It is his vision. It is his passion. It is his project. And it is his gift to the internet and to the knife world.
It is an amazing thing. And, as a result, you can imagin why some people get upset when you come in here implying that this site is something else.
The search feature is very processor-intensive. It is the weakest point of the otherwise quite nice software that runs this place. We've been hoping for years that Jelsoft, the makers of this software, would improve it, but they haven't yet. Several years ago, the site started to run very slowly and Spark disabled the search feature and that brought performance back up to an acceptible level (even given the increased traffic in the form of posts asking "why isn't the search feature working?"). That bought Spark some time to buy and install new servers. That was not a cheap nor an easy thing to do. Remember, we're not talking here about your average desktop PC. The average PC couldn't do this job and would simply melt under the load. These are purpose-built internet servers and they cost thousands of dollars each. We've been running on those servers very comfortably ever since. But, lately, things have started to slow down again and the administration statistics clearly show that our old enemy the search feature is causing problems again. Spark is now looking at having to purchase new servers or upgrade or augment the existing servers again. It will be expensive and it will be difficult. So, while he studies those issues and prepares for that expense and effort, we will run with restricted search for a while again.
