Moo

About 250-300 USD per year. It's changing a bit as hosting costs are going up & down as things like RAM & CPUs are constrained - but the last 6 months or so the hosting is about 15 EUR per month, which is very cheap. I've moved us a few times to keep these costs under control. Software licensing for Invision is another $40 USD per 6 months. I want to get us off Invision because they're just rent seeking at this point and it's not worth it. Our donations aren't regular but we have enough in the coffers to keep us going for another year or so. If we get off of Invision, it will be closer to 150 per year - the variable cost is hosting and with AI driving up the cost of storage, RAM, CPU etc I would expect this will be volatile for a while.

November 2001 is the earliest thing I can find on the wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20001119174500/http://www.wrestlingukfanforum.com/ The forum existed before anyone was brave enough to buy an entire domain for it - but @Junkman bought "wrestlingukfanforum.com" at some point. At some point I snapped up the ukff and we've been pursued by suitors of memorable 4-letter domains ever since. Prior to this we definitely had a shared URL on a geocities type shared platform that was exclusively for forums. It was rubbish but was the nucleus of everything we have today. That would have surely been around 1998-2000 era I think. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of that service. The number 9803 sticks in my head, which may have been the ID assigned to our forum on the platform, or I could be hallucinating.

Fuck off rick and take the 3 points with you 🩵 .

Ha that is mental. I also think it's probably off by at least a few years - we might be closer to 30 in reality! As I get older, I forget more and more of the details but when I got involved it was on a shared forum (modern day we'd call it a SaaS!) hosting platform and was super basic... like a newsgroup essentially but somehow the worst of both worlds - newsgroups and the web mashed together in one awful threaded UI. Then we moved it to... ikonboard if I remember correctly... and perhaps a few other iterations I've forgotten and many many hosting providers and outages along the way. The current software is InvisionBoard, and they are price gouging us and every customer... so I see another migration on the horizon to keep our running costs under control. My goal has always been to not interfere too much and to try and resist the temptation to plaster the place with advertising. I feel like in the early days there was so much immature silliness that the forum required a lot of rules and a lot of moderation. I suspect because we've all aged, things are much calmer now. It would be fun to do a UKFF census one day to validate if we are just all old bastards who've been here ~forever. And YES - if you haven't donated to the running costs, please consider it... https://donate.ukff.com/