Announcing BYC Golden Feather Memberships

[The Chicken Lady]

The private forum is ONLY for discussion of new offers and specials, and to get help with GFM features.

All discussion of anything else must take place in the regular forum; any GFM who starts a topic there that is not related to GFM offers and specials will find it moved to the regular forum where everyone can see.

Thank you for understanding.

 

[coloradochick]

ETA: Okay, dis-lodging foot from mouth

I misunderstood the forum info. I thought it was going to be 2 seperate forums not a regular forum and a product (?) forum. Sorry guys.

 

[Guinea Goonie]

My dear Rusty Hills Farm

The costs of running an operation like this site needs to be addressed.

I know what it takes to do this sort of thing. Servers, electricity, a home for the server, probably a T1 line, access to the server via secure networks and Software upgrades and support can be overwhelming. I would imagine the cost of HDs for storage is pretty intense. Not to mention the time and effort it takes to keep the server running by the administrator. I am sure this is not some PC, but a UNIX server.

Just my 2 cents. I welcome a chance to contribute to the site.

I have plenty of T-shirts and do not need a BYC one.

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

Thanks for all the feedback! Please know that all of these items (and tons more) have been though of for the past year (or more) and have been discuss extensively among the staff.

There are a lot of requests that we receive privately from people that want additional features that we can't roll out to everyone (not yet). We also hear from people who win BYC Contests that they aren't interested in anything in the store. The GFM answers these needs.

This has not, and will not impact any of the non GFM accounts. If anything it will enhance them. As mentioned in the first post, the GFM's will be given access to things first (our beta testers) with the hope that eventually we can roll these features out to the rest of the community.

In general, please trust us. The people responsible for this new addition are the same ones responsible for the decisions over the past 2 years (and more). I don't see very many cases (if any) where the leadership at BYC has led this group astray, but I see a TON of examples where we, as a team and community have done some AMAZING things together. The hope (and expectation) is that this will be another.

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

Quote:
Fantastic question! (boy we have some smart peeps here!)

While the standard upload rules apply, the expectation is that the pictures will remain hosted by us and will not be deleted even if you change your membership status. The only downside is that you'll always be at you upload limit.

The same applies to PM's

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

Quote:
Title changes are made by request. We don't have a limit on the number of times, but if the requests become excessive then we'll have to put a limit on the number or frequency of changes.

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

Quote:
Sorry about that. The upgrade process is manual (for now) while we make sure everything is working properly. We've received a few requests and are processing them. If your upgrade is not process in the next 3 hours please emaile [email protected]

 

[ozark hen]

well said, Rob. being a member here for almost two years now, I trust your judgement or I wouldn't have been a member this long. Again, I see it as a good way to support this site.

 

[Dipsy Doodle Doo]

I welcome a chance to contribute to the site.

And I as well.

Lisa​

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

Quote:
Very good point, and for anybody interested, this should satisfy your inner geek:

We have a server in a fully managed datacenter. The facility has state of the art power redundancy, industrial cooling, continuous battery power, industrial-class generators, and over a ton of cooling capacity per individual server rack. It also has top notch security & fire suppression.

I have full root access to the server and can do almost anything remotely (most via a linux prompt) that you could do at the actual machine (reboot, install applications, etc). The only stuff I can't do (swap hard drives, pull the power cord, etc.) can be done by the 24/7 onsite staff.

The server is a Dual Xeon 3 GHz processor (two quad cores = 8 CPUs) with SCSI HardDrives in RAID 10 with dual gigabit network interfaces.

Oh, and I'm pretty picky about backups too: img/smilies/big_smile.png" alt="big_smile" />">http://www.nifty-stuff.com/daily-mysql-database-backup.php