How would one make a donation now?

You can go to the Equipped to Survive Home Page, and click on the white Donate Now box with blue and purple text in it. It will bring up a pop-up that will link you to a site where you can make a donation by Credit or Debit Card.

They'll email you a reciept.

You can also go to the ETS Foundation page as well if I remember correctly.

I just had a thought... Or perhaps a question.

Would it have been better to donate the money to Alan Romania for the Janus Charity Challenge where it would have had a chance to make more money for ETS?

Dang... I wish I had thought of that earlier. I have this uncanny ability to think of these types of things after the fact...

Yow. We oughta switch to something else. vBulletin looks cheaper, and there are at least a couple of very good open source forum systems that are free. The one I'm familiar with has a UBB threads migration script, so we can keep all the current content. I'm assuming the others do as well.

I personally like this idea. Get a great product (because Doug knows quality), advertise for a great site, and donate to the cause.

> They also had special sections within the forums that only donor members could enter similar to
> what is described in the LTP section description.

How does that work out there?

If there was one here and I was a donor, I think I still might rather post in the public forums so as to maximimse chance of good replies. If some topics can only be posted to the private forum, I'd be concerned that it would get enough people reading for critical mass. To me it seems like a symbolic gesture rather than a practical basis for a forum.

I like the idea of getting a badge displayed next to my name in the public forums.

By far the greatest amount of posting went on in the non-subscription sections because, like here in the ETS forums, people were interested in helping out newer members and were interested in sharing their knowledge and experiences with those who may have been new to the subject.

What took place in the subscriber sections were more advanced exchanges of ideas where there was already something of a shared knowledge base. Topics tended to have longer lifespans in those sections (one was reaching the 5000 post mark when I finally dropped off the forums), and the tendancy was that there was less redundant posting.

Please understand that I don't mean any of this in some sort of elitist fashion... I only mean that people who realized the worth of the site and who were willing to subscribe probably had been around for a longer period of time and because of that tended to have a large base of knowledge to draw from. Obviously that was not always the case. From time to time someone new would come to the forums that had just as much if not more knowledge of the topics covered.

Anyway... I don't know if such a thing would work here... I'm just spitballing ideas... <img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />