2017-8 Holiday Season plea (THANKS so far!!)

Announcements and discussions ABOUT the site. Info on registering, ideas for improvement, FAQs and the like.

Moderators: piaptk, tragwag, Steve E., Aussie0zborn

Post Reply
User avatar
Steve E.
Site Admin
Posts: 1914
Joined: Fri Jun 24, 2005 3:24 pm
Location: Brooklyn, New York, USA
Contact:

2017-8 Holiday Season plea (THANKS so far!!)

Post: # 48757Unread post Steve E.
Thu Dec 21, 2017 5:22 pm

December 21, 2017

Dear Member of The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls,

7" 45 version:

It's that time of year again. I, Steve E., the administrator of The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls chat forum, am humbly asking your annual help to keep this site going.

If this site has been life-enriching to you, please take part now. 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.

A contribution of just $20 will make a big difference. If your business income or most meaningful hobby depends on the site, please consider more. For donations of $40 or more, you can customize your link, and also 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.

12" 33 1/3 LP version:

I just renewed the domains and hosting of the Secret Society of Lathe Trolls chat forum for another year. Earlier this year, by demand of both our members and google, I significantly updated the security of the site: I migrated it to secure HTTPS connections, with SSL certificates. This took considerable research and time, much trial and error, and no small expense.

I also continued the backstage daily maintenance of the site, including attending to the needs of the now nearly 2700 registered users: Forgotten passwords, manual membership approvals, requests to edit posts or update image links, and the occasional offstage or onstage drama. Maintaining backups of the whole site. Scouting for additional moderators.

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.

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. Ironically, I am not a professional record-cutter; as some of you know, I started this site as a newbie, dissatisfied with the informational available to me at the time. (To some degree, I have remained a newbie!) Running the site takes diplomacy, triage, care, and both empathy and a thick skin. My maintenance hardware is a newly-purchased 2015 Mac laptop -- as my 2009 one finally gave up the ghost-- and a new tester smartphone, to make sure the site works in the mobile world.

Please help cover these site expenses, labor, and computer hardware, with an affordable financial contribution, at an amount of your choosing.

Good stuff you already know:

You are using the site, or you have enjoyed it at any point in the past 12 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.
  • 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, to the new exciting record cutting and pressing solutions.
  • It helps sellers and buyers of equipment--both common and unobtanium-- 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, living engineering legends, and hobbyists on every continent on the planet. And...
  • It's fun!
I'm learning about myself the longer I do this: I am easily overwhelmed. I'm perfectionistic. Time rushes by. I have not always followed through efficiently with the individual "Thank you's" mail messages that you deserve--even though, you'd best believe, I am loudly thanking you over here when your contribution arrives. What I DO do, though, is thank all sponsors and financial supporters of the site on the "Our Sponsors" page, accessible on a button at the top of the page. (Check it out!) At the time of new fundraisers, I archive older sponsorships to a list further down the page. Your support should be memorialized permanently, and it is. But, I also need to incentivize renewed support, so the site can keep going. In a very real way, this site is here now because these individual people and (generally small) businesses gave financially, sometimes repeatedly, in the prior 5 years.

As I predicted a year ago, 2017 has been a strange and challenging year for a great many of us. ("May you live in interesting times....") As the year draws to a close, and you prepare for various holidays, please help this site in its goal to help make 2018 a good supportive year for you: a resource and a place of community, at the very least, in the unique niche it occupies.

Wishing you all holidays with a warm high end and pleasant dynamics,

Steve E.
Administrator
The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls

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

User avatar
Steve E.
Site Admin
Posts: 1914
Joined: Fri Jun 24, 2005 3:24 pm
Location: Brooklyn, New York, USA
Contact:

Re: 2017-8 Holiday Season plea (THANKS so far!!)

Post: # 48895Unread post Steve E.
Mon Jan 08, 2018 5:57 pm

38 Lathe Troll members and lurkers have contributed since December. THANK YOU. You are keeping the site running in a real and tangible way. You have been listed at the top of the "Our Sponsors" page, along with contributors from the prior few months who had not been thanked in a timely manner.

A few of you have asked if it is too late to contribute towards this fundraising drive. It's never too late, and I will update the sponsor page as more contributions come in. The "top list" represents about 8% of the membership that has been active on the site since last year's campaign. I'd love to get that number up to 30%. Might that be possible?

If this site enriches your life, please support the efforts and expenses that keep it going.

User avatar
Steve E.
Site Admin
Posts: 1914
Joined: Fri Jun 24, 2005 3:24 pm
Location: Brooklyn, New York, USA
Contact:

Re: 2017-8 Holiday Season plea (THANKS so far!!)

Post: # 49901Unread post Steve E.
Mon Mar 26, 2018 9:53 pm

A further update: Another fundraising letter from a few weeks ago resulted in a further influx of contributions. These were greatly appreciated. They were also a site lifesaver.

I have lagged on updating the Sponsor page with these contributions, and lagged as well on my thank you letters. These will come shortly.

In the meantime, thank you all VERY much.

Post Reply