Frisco Historical Society?

My "disposition thoughts" as they now stand -

My current plan is to leave my models, unbuilt kits, etc to son Kurt. Don't know if he will ever become interested in model railroading again or not. After all, he has two daughters, no sons. Addison does play with her Thomas Tank Engine set often, but mainly with the "Frisco" caboose I gave her last Christmas ..... because it plays music! She dances to it. He could always sell the stuff.

More importantly - my Frisco non-model collection (books, TT, paper, track diagrams, car & loco diagrams, records, forms, pictures, slides, wall hangings, letters, notes, etc, etc, etc), I had planned to leave to the St Louis Mercantile Library at UMSL - except for whatever Kurt wants to keep. Along with their famous Barriger collection, the Mercantile library has quite a railroad library collection there. But, of course, it is not Frisco specific. I am a Merc library member & supporter.

I have a similar dilemma with my naval history library, which almost equals the railroad library in numbers of books, in particular on the German navies of WW1 & WW2. Wonder if the Merc library also wants to become known for a German High Seas Fleet & Kriegsmarine naval library collection! - mine is pretty extensive. I've been collecting it since high school.

Hopefully, I have many, many more years yet to figure out what to do with it all.

Ken

 

Although Mike has put endless work into this site, and indeed the account on the server that hosts this forum (and related content) is in his name, this site is a group effort.

We initially registered the domain name frisco.org in the 1990s and it is in my name.

Many other people are also responsible for the presence of Frisco content on the Internet. Doug Hughes was someone that I remember as being a first contact on the Internet in the 1990s in relation to the railroad we love.

Some sort of organization will be needed in the future if Mike, myself, or others are not here to manage this.

Without Mike this forum/social network would not exist and for that we owe him a debt of gratitude. I am sure that his intention is to make sure it is built for the future.

Charlie

 

So far, we've had some good discussion but maybe it needs to be put into perspective.

Mike (Corley), what is the cost of maintaining this site on an annual basis? The figure must include all fees including at least one person's internet access to maintain the site, backup costs (assuming backup is being done so all that has been collected is not lost) and any other costs that I haven't mentioned.

Additionally how much of your time is expended on a monthly or annual basis maintaining the site?

Finally, with the existing levels of contributions, how much of the costs are actually covered?

With this base information, we may be able to begin to ascertain the financial feasability of developing and maintaining a true historical society and document repository.

 

Howdy,

In answer to the questions about operating Frisco.org, the donations we receive covers our costs and keeps a little in the bank for upgrades and new software add-ons. We use expensive software for our forum, compared with others, but it is the easiest to maintain, the most hacker proof, the most reliable, and IMHO, the best for FRISCrg.

As for time, that is a hard one to answer. I am on FRISCrg every day when I am near a computer, but not always investing huge amounts of time "working" on the website. It is more of a check out what is going on, moving posts that are categorized incorrectly, answering emails about registration, and doing periodic backups, in addition to those done by our host, Hostgator. We use vBulletin forum software and have used other portal software with it. Those costs are documented on the vBulletin sites. I'd have to look to see the exact amount.

From a personal and maintenance standpoint, I'd have Internet access, no matter what, so I look at the cost for maintaining the site as a sunk cost, paid for by me. Bottom line is we pay for hosting a large amount of data and for forum software, that's it. Donations support it most of the time. Ii' ve paid for it so long, I dont really pay attention to short falls, I just pay for them out of my personal modeling budget. Anyone who wants exact costs, I'll work those out on an annual basis and pass those on. I don't have access to all the data tonight, or I'd post it.

There isn't enough to pay for historical society costs, too; we'd probably need to charge a society fee. What you'd get for your society fees would need to be determined. My objective has been to make FRISCrg free to anyone who wants to participate. Since I retired, that hasn't been as financially easy as when I worked, hence the need for donations. They do the job, our members responded well and continue to respond with enough donations to cover costs.

Since FRISCrg is almost self maintaining from a content perspective, I don't have to spend a lot of time maintaining posts. We seem to do well at policing ourselves.

What I would like to see from a website help perspective is a technology skilled person to back me up. Currently, Charlie Dix provides that service, but he has a full time job, too, plus he runs Trainboard.com. Having an assistant who could do the same things I do would help ensure we continue operating without a hitch. After working on the FMIG and Frisco sites since the mid 90's, it comes pretty easy for me. Upgrades take the most time and are the highest risk to our users. You never know when something will go wrong, and you'd have to restore the site from backups. I've only had to do that a couple of times in fifteen years, but it does take years off my life when I do. For the most part, we operate without interruption to users most of the time.

Moderators help, but what I'd like to do is train and groom an assistant webmaster whose heart is Frisco red and who our community could count on to become out future webmaster. The reason I proposed the question and poll about a historical society was to formalize the need to keep the Frisco going.

We have done most of the things a historical society does, with the exception of a newsletter, and Richard is taking care of that, now. We could easily rebadge ourselves as the Frisco Historical Society. There is a lot of Frisco material that has not been digitized and shared with the community. I'd love to have diagrams and photos about every single car class, loco class, structure, station, etc., available to the community on FRISCrg. We are making progress, but we're not there yet. It takes a lot of dedication from Frisco heroes. It would be nice to have a wise moderator/hero for each category listed in The Real Frisco, plus the same for the modeling community.

Oops, I'm rambling, but I have read each post, and am formulating some ideas and recommendations for the group. It is nice to simply do what we want. KISS is good.

Best regards,
Mike

 

Mike and I have talked, in the past, about hosting frisco.org on the TrainBoard server, which is RAID configured. This would make the site more secure and probably faster.

We would just have to figure out how much it would use in resources (probably not a lot) and make sure the donations cover it.

You also might have to have a banner ad at some point to raise a little money.

Charlie

 

Another idea would be to offer monthly subscriptions. On TrainBoard we have offered a $2 monthly subscription which (I believe) nets us $1.88 per donation. At the request of several members we also offered a $5 monthly subscription.

The $2 option will deduct that amount from a PayPal account each month and nets the site approximately $22.56 yearly from each member. 25 people subscribing at that rate = $564.

That, coupled with individual donations (and possible advertising revenue) should help the site greatly.

The $2 subscription is also non-painful for people who keep a balance in PayPal as it is no more than the cost of a cup of coffee, once per month.

Just ideas...

Charlie