My thoughts on how this site should work

This is my off the cuff first pass attempt at a mission statement.

The purpose of DPRevived.com is to provide a friendly and active environment to promote the polite exchange of ideas, assist in the building/enhancing of knowledge and skills at all levels of interest using accurate information about all things related to photography.

'respectful'?

Or "civil" that was suggested earlier. I don't like "polite" either. But I suffer from ESL so what do I know? 😉

I think I may want to suggest 'help' ;)

I'm not sure how well that will go down with non-American members.
Personally, I'm rather fond of the English language in its original, dare I say 'corrrect' form.

Is there really a reason to commercialize / have ads running on this site?

I had to research the market when I was buying a server for myself a couple months back, so here is my analysis:

The hosting itself could be done on a server costing not more than $40/m at the extreme end assuming DPR like levels of activity. An annual crowdfunder could cover that.

As for image storage, Hetzner's storage boxes are a great value, starting at $3.50/m for 1 TB to $20/month for 10TB of storage.

At 10MB per image, that works to 100,000-1,000,000 total stored images.

I'm available to help setup the server. I think it's important to pick a reliable, cost affordable option from the outset so the community doesn't needlessly have to maintain larger expenses.

It occurred to me this morning that I belonged to another site that was uncommonly civil and positive. It came from nowhere to become the dominant site for the hobby in a mater of 3 years in large part because that site had become arrogant about its position in the hobby and that attitude carried through to moderation.

Here is a link to the terms of service:
Reef to Reef

The first four headings in the terms of service are:
1. Be courteous
2. Be appropriate
3. Be welcoming
4. Be ethical

I would add to that: Be positive

The two things that stand out to me about that site are that: the owner regularly posts and participates, above all else he is both welcoming and positive. While things can get snarky occasionally (we all get up on the wrong side of the bed occasionally), that positivity and welcoming attitude shine through.

I am very happy with the concept of a form of community ownership, although along with that comes community responsibility. I don't know what the expected or hoped for rate of joining members was, but it seems quite rapid and may get faster as the end of dpreview draws near. More members, more photos, more traffic may lead to an increasingly vibrant experience, but it also leads to greater costs. Perhaps initially a request for donations, no extra privileges, apart perhaps for an appropriate icon next to the user name, would help to get things running as smoothly as possible for the first few months whilst more people join and long term funding issues are discussed and finalised.

Yes, I've said it before. Get that PP button up so we can free ourselves from some cash.

I'm very pleased how things are going so far. It looks like we got the momentum.
My only two concerns going forward, points to two potential source of issues :

1. Cooperative Governance.
2. Forum Software.

I think the statistics of failure for cooperatives is pretty high, but in the digital world, it might be a different story. I think someone mentioned examples of forum communities that have similar model. It'd be good idea to see how they are structured.
I hope the leadership knows how to craft a good balance between authoritarian vs democratic governance, away from both extremes. Bob and Alan seem to me moderate and aware of this, but it is always good remind it.

I'm not familiar with Misago, but I played once with vBulletin which is a commercial forum software used in communities with more than 1 million users.
Even those are limited, so I'm affraid Misago would be too limited if the goal is to replicate the DPReview forums. Also I'm not sure how robust it is once it start to handling more users.
The huge problem with this, is that to change the forum software later, you'd need to start from scratch, unless there is a way to migrate data smoothly.
I think management should think seriously about it before is too late.
Perhaps Misago has the potential to expand beyond templates, and that would be good but I don't know.

So I just wanted to express these two concerns.
Thanks to Bob and Alan for doing an amazing job.

I am a mod on two forums.

Forum N°1

The hosting and work to keep it up to date is done by a sub-contractor in South America. It is not very expensive, something like USD 500 per year.

For the donations, that forum uses a plugin for XenForo that allows Paypal donations (1 time, monthly, etc, to be defined) and each member who donated had a special tag under the username. Might this be something we could use here? I am not sure if Misago offers that sort of plugin / functionality?

There was only 1 person who "owned" the forum, he was a decent bloke who used the products in question, knew a lot about them and kept a cool head / was not an ego. I inherited the Admin role from him as he changed direction in life and wanted to go somewhere else and let someone else run the forum. He still officially owns it, but rarely participated, and the donations paid for the hosting. All is good.

Forum N°2

This is the nightmare scenario: This one was purchased by a company that is buying many forums and exploiting them for ad revenue. This company makes up new rules for the forums all of the time (often these rules conflict with the forum's own rules) and the company does not tell the Admins / Mods. They then sells ad space to random companies which have nothing to do with the theme of the forum. When the mods ban the ads (which look like spam) they get reprimanded. It's a nightmare situation, not able to tell spam from paid adverts and with no communication from the company. Their solution was to put a message on the webpage they use to sell the advertising space saying "if any mod gives you trouble, tell us and we'll take care of it".

Glad to hear that will not be happening here!

I had a thought. How was the predecessor to DPReview under Askey set up when it was a British organization and before Amazon was involved?

The reference to "polite" could be substituted with "civility" or "respectful" or various other words.

However, and I think this might be what you're hinting at, it might be better expressed in a separate 'code of conduct' (or 'rules of engagement' or 'forum guidelines' etc.) rather than being part of the mission statement.

I guess I'm thinking that the mission statement is giving the why, whereas the word polite is injecting some how into the middle of your why. ; )

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I don't think that we can do it with Misago, which is precisely the reason for choosing something that wasn't a stand-alone forum ssytem, rather a forum component on a powerful web framework.
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Excellent, that is true.
If needed and resources allows it, you can slowly build and migrate later to a custom forum on the Django framework.

Yes cooperative style governance works but it has its pitfalls that we should be aware of, in contrast to privately owned entities which are much simpler to manage. I just wanted to mention it. I'm not suggesting DPRevived should be private, but not shy away from being slightly for profits. Profit for future growth.

I suppose Misago would work for now, but it has limits and I'm glad Bob is aware of this already.