Increasing Gold Membership numbers?

[Brian]

Constructive criticism or comments are always welcome, no offense it taken.
Just to address a few points above.
Way back when we moved to this hosting, we already had well over 250K attachments. Now that number is likely far more than double. No mean feat to try and move hosting. It's not something you can quickly FTP across. I also want to host here in South Africa, so when I have an issue I can pick up a phone and actually call someone. Don't want to be tens of thousands of miles away speaking to a bot. Also, the cost of hosting overseas is more than we can bear, given the funds that come in. This attach has been inconvenient, but we will get through it, and things will get back to normal. If they don't, I'll look at other options. But again, everything comes down to money.

The site is well known. Everywhere. Just type into any AI chat "What is the largest Japanese sword forum in the world"
The problem is that many collectors are not young anymore. They prefer to collect in person, and many are old school. Even in Japan, it is hard to change that mindset. We would love more interaction, but people prefer what they know. The younger generation prefers Facebook...instant gratification even if the data is disposable and far less reliable. We have a good membership here, that ebbs and flows, but there is still more info stored here than anywhere else.

I prefer to keep this mostly on topic. I don't want to cross over to the martial arts much. There are places for that, and they deal with it better than we can. We are about the study and preservation, not so much the use.

Image uploading is more than sufficient. Really it is. We can't be expected to accommodate everyone who wants to take a 50MP photo on their phone and upload it directly. We don't need billboard size photos and people need to learn to crop and edit before they upload. 
Currently regular members can upload 3 megs per post. Since pics can easily be brought down to under 500kb, you are able to upload enough provided you aren't trying to upload pics that are several megs each. PLUS you can then reply and do more pics, with the same limit in that thread, adding more pics. 
If people want more per post then they can upgrade to Gold membership. There you are allowed 7.5MB per post. More than enough.
Pic max sizing is ample to view only. We don't need to scroll several pages across to see everything.
I think the post limits are more than enough if people learn free image resizing and learn a little about DPI and what is sufficient.

As for the customizable feed, see my post above. This is easy and worth playing with.
We will be going to new software by the end of the year and there will be many more features and changes, and I think everyone will benefit.

[eternal_newbie]

2 hours ago, Brian said:

Since pics can easily be brought down to under 500kb, you are able to upload enough provided you aren't trying to upload pics that are several megs each. PLUS you can then reply and do more pics, with the same limit in that thread, adding more pics. 

 

I mentioned it in another thread but, if you really must upload your full-resolution high-quality blade photography (and by all means do so, we love some good eye candy on this board ) the best way to do this is by using an external hosting service (Google Drive, Dropbox, Photobucket, Zonerama etc.) and linking to it from your thread. This lets people access the full-quality files at their leisure, without taxing the NMB's resources unduly.