Dec 2016: A Fundraising Plea from SSLT

[Steve E.]

December 18, 2016

Dear Member of The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls,

It is fundraising time, and the site needs your help.

You are using the site, or you have enjoyed it in the past 11 years, as an enthusiastic sharer or lurker; as a giver or consumer of knowledge and equipment, related to the making of old fashioned grooved records.

As you know, this one-of-a-kind site runs without major support. We don’t have fees: neither for membership, nor even, as of now, for the "Classifieds & Tip-offs" section listings. All we have are your friends and you: quirky brilliant individuals; operators of niche businesses; researchers; vinyl fanatics, and/or home tinkerers. You are the Lathe Trolls. You make the site worth visiting. I, with your help, and with the generous volunteer efforts of our moderators, keep it functioning.

I just renewed the domains and hosting of the Secret Society of Lathe Trolls chat forum for another year. Please help cover this expense, and for other expenses of time, computer hardware and labor, with an affordable financial contribution, at an amount of your choosing.

This year, I continued the backstage daily maintenance of the site, including attending to the needs of the now nearly 2300 users: Forgotten passwords, manual membership approvals, and the occasional offstage or onstage drama. Maintaining backups of the whole site. Scouting for additional moderators. A brief experiment in automatic approvals led to a disastrous period of scrubbing spambots, and so back to manual approvals we went.

This administration is generally performed and/or refereed by this one guy writing you: a freelance musician, Wurlitzer Electric Piano repairman, and audio editor living in Brooklyn. Running the site takes time, diplomacy, triage, and psychic energy. My maintenance hardware is currently a humble 8-year old Mac laptop on its 3rd hard drive and 4th complete rebuild.

Good stuff you already know:

• LatheTrolls.com enables the passing on of record-creating knowledge and experience that had been on the verge of being lost.
• It encourages innovation, while aiding in the salvage and repair of irreplaceable older equipment.
• It showcases vinyl art.
• It singularly promotes businesses in this reviving industry, offers problem-solving data and schematics for everything from old home units to Neumann VMS-80s, and helps sellers and buyers of equipment find each other.
• It is a unique, invaluable, deep, massive, sprawling database of the world's living knowledge of record-cutting and record-pressing.
• Its users volunteer, daily, to solve the most maddening of technical problems.
• It connects record-making professionals and hobbyists on every continent on the planet. And...
• It's fun!

Last year I added a new menu button at the top of the site. It says "Our Sponsors," and clicking on it will bring you to a page that lists them. In a very real way, this site is here now because these people and (generally small) businesses gave financially, sometimes repeatedly, in the prior 4 years. Even the smallest of these added up, and the site has survived. (Do check it out!)

In 2015, 130 members contributed to our fundraising drive. In 2016, I'm sure we would all love to see even more.

If this site has been life-enriching to you, please take part now. A contribution of just $20 will make a big difference. If your business income depends on the site, please consider more. Clicking the golden PayPal "Contribute" button at the top of this page will allow you to enter an amount you'd like to give. Or, PayPal to: lathetrolls@gmail.com.

Please email or include a note to help me credit your username correctly on the “Our Sponsors” page. For donations of $40 or more, you can customize your link, and have it connect to a webpage outside the Lathe Trolls site. Your giving will keep this community, and this vital database of record-cutting knowledge, alive.

2016 was a strange, hard year for many, and it may just get stranger next year, in many realms. As the year draws to a close, and you prepare for various holidays, please help this site in its goal to help make 2017 a good year for you; at the very least, in the unique niche it occupies.


Wishing you all groovy holidays,

Steve E.
Administrator
The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls

PS. Please post the link to this page:
http://www.lathetrolls.com/fundraiser
on the social media of your choice. Spread the word!

[Steve E.]

25 members of the site have donated in the past few days. This is heartening, and it helps a great deal. That's 3.7 percent of you who have actively logged on this year, and I don't even know whether many more know about the fundraiser yet.

"Thank You" emails will go out to you as the dust clears a little, and you will see yourselves listed on the new section of the Sponsor page within the week, if you are not there already.

Around 700 users have logged into the site this year, and I know there are a large number of non-logging-in lurkers out there, too. I'm gonna keep encouraging your support, folks, during this fundraiser. (it's not easy for me to do .... But I have to.)

Anyone else?

Thanks, everyone.

[Steve E.]

A short-term THANK YOU to those who contributed so far!!! I have been deep in the weeds and I have not finished sorting out many usernames vs contributions. Please know, your contribution WAS MOST LIKELY received, and you will receive a formal acknowledgement very shortly. (or, in some cases, an email saying more or less "now, which one ARE you on the site? You are using a different email address to contribute. Are you even a registered member?")

It helps a LOT and it means a lot, always. And more to come.

Yours, with deepest thanks and appreciation,

Steve

[Voxster1965]

Good work Steve and all collaborators and moderators - without you we can't keep the platters turning - thank you.

[Boydie]

If you want free hosting give me a shout, I've some dedicated servers you can use if you'd like.

[Steve E.]

I have updated the sponsor page to thank the current contributors to the sponsorship drive. I'm sorry it took so long!!! It was a complex thing to program. It is not too late to contribute and be added!!

Thanks everyone, so very very much.

[adames]

Guys/gals, I'm personally sorry for my lack of participation in this forum myself. Made worse by the fact that I am now living in a city with a brand new vinyl pressing plant nearby?!?!? (Miami, FL !) The growth of vinyl records is astounding and my absence from this forum should be punished!

For that I donated $50, the craft and trade is alive!

[rsimms3]

I noticed something very concerning yesterday. I did a search on Google for "Rekokut R8B" because I recently received mine back from the repair man and I wanted to see what general information was out there as well as the one thread jesusfwrl had created with his restoration project. I noticed that all of the more recent topics were archived on Google through Taptalk and not directly to the site. It concerns me because if the redirect from Google isn't to the site then the site isn't getting hits and direct advertising is lost because Taptalk is doing their own advertising and side stepping local site advertising. Taptalk links to the forum, but if you have the information you want from a direct link people are less likely to actually visit the forum for hits and see the dedicated advertising. See the Taptalk layout here related to the Rekokut search I performed: https://www.tapatalk.com/topic/6913-60366 Maybe explore disabling Taptalk? Maybe this has to do with my personal computer setup, but either way I wanted to mention it.

[Steve E.]

I appreciate this heads up! I don't want to disable tapatalk but I do want to fix this problem.

[Steve E.]

I received an inspiring number of additional site contributions in mid- March and I updated the sponsor page to reflect this. There may be a couple of additional stragglers I need to add. Please know that all contributors will be thanked by email shortly. Thank all of you so very much.

Steve