Linkspun.com

Hi,

Everyone has been contacting me lately to find out what is going on with Linkspun, and more importantly Jdoughs. I am in the same boat as many of you, having not heard from John in many months. We are all very concerned for him, and hope whatever situation he is in he is able to get out of sooner than later. With that being said, I created this thread to give updates about the situation.

I've spoken to Amerinoc about the sites' hosting and they said while John has outstanding hosting bills for his other sites, their agreement to host Linkspun & Tradespun for him will stand as long as the domains are pointed at Amerinoc. A friend of John is currently in control of Linkspun.com, so that should be safe.

Unfortunately due to the situation it seems that Amerinoc has restricted my access to the servers, so there's little I can do right now as far as backups. I hope that will change.

If you know anymore insight on the situation, feel free to share it here.

PS: Amerinoc said they have talked to John in the last 2 weeks, that's all they would tell me.

PPS: From Amerinoc: "We maintain daily backups for these sites, that was part of the deal, we won't stop that and we have no intention of wiping the sites."

Ok this is weird. I just got a trade request on tradespun. I go to internal pages (like http://www.tradespun.com/trades_search.php) and tradespun is running just fine. But the main url tradespun.com says it's suspended. WTF?

Try clearing your cache, I think Tradespun.com is back online and functional.

Thank you very much for the updates.

I very much hope he is ok - and that you can keep the boat sailing till hes back.

I've just signed up to Tradespun so it's working now.

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drocd wrote: I've spoken to Amerinoc about the sites' hosting and they said while John has outstanding hosting bills for his other sites, their agreement to host Linkspun & Tradespun for him will stand as long as the domains are pointed at Amerinoc. A friend of John is currently in control of Linkspun.com, so that should be safe.

Unfortunately due to the situation it seems that Amerinoc has restricted my access to the servers, so there's little I can do right now as far as backups. I hope that will change.

Good news what about paying the server to Amerinoc? Here are so many who are using this great tool and who knows maybe it helps also to linkpun if somebody could fix the little bugs. I will donate 20 bucks every month and i belive i am not the only one who will help here ...

Yeah. Me too. Amerinoc just want to be paid their bills, right? So, I got some bucks for them. Who is also in?

No one has spoken to him in months/weeks, his websites are offline and yet Amerinoc has had a conversation with him? Truly bizarre.

I hope he comes back and that everything is alright with him.

I'm also In. Thanks for the update.

I'll donate to Amerinoc. Contact me here via PM or email.

slimjim wrote:Yeah. Me too. Amerinoc just want to be paid their bills, right? So, I got some bucks for them. Who is also in?

I've spoken to Amerinoc about this. They don't want anyone paying his bills for him at this time. Besides, there are essentially no hosting bills for Linkspun / Tradespun. There is an agreement in place for advertising Amerinoc hosting in exchange for the server.

EthnicLover wrote:No one has spoken to him in months/weeks, his websites are offline and yet Amerinoc has had a conversation with him? Truly bizarre.

I hope he comes back and that everything is alright with him.

Amerinoc has spoken to him and in fact I've heard that other people have had contact with him recently as well. John is a live, and if we are lucky we will hear something from him soon.

glad to hear good news...

and of course I´d also love to pay for the service when we could be sure it´ll stay alive for years...

Happy days are here again!

slimjim wrote:Yeah. Me too. Amerinoc just want to be paid their bills, right? So, I got some bucks for them. Who is also in?

Me too, of course.

drocd wrote:

EthnicLover wrote:No one has spoken to him in months/weeks, his websites are offline and yet Amerinoc has had a conversation with him? Truly bizarre.

I hope he comes back and that everything is alright with him.

Amerinoc has spoken to him and in fact I've heard that other people have had contact with him recently as well. John is a live, and if we are lucky we will hear something from him soon.

Well that's good news at least. I hope whatever is wrong resolves soon for him. He's a great guy.

Hey, I would also be more than happy to shoot 20 bucks a month for this awesome tool, cant go wrong, yeah theres a couple bugs that need tending, but all in all if we all paid every month i bet Linkspun would excel.

drocd wrote:

slimjim wrote:Yeah. Me too. Amerinoc just want to be paid their bills, right? So, I got some bucks for them. Who is also in?

I've spoken to Amerinoc about this. They don't want anyone paying his bills for him at this time. Besides, there are essentially no hosting bills for Linkspun / Tradespun. There is an agreement in place for advertising Amerinoc hosting in exchange for the server.

For anyone that wan´t to support, I guess adding an amerinoc link in your signature on other boards might be a good thing to do..

amerinoc is top notch hosting. I link to them from the webmaster page of all of my 80+ blogs and encourage webmasters to use their services

Hope all is well, love the service. Need to see him post here to really calm peoples nerves.

I would be in for a nominal monthly amount.

In fact this should be a pay service, even if it was just $10/mo it would go a long long way towards keeping the riff raff out...

Move from expensive servers Linkspun U.S. to France for a quick power-efficient servers for small money. https://www.ovh.pl/produkty/oferty_dedykowane.xml (server room, near Paris, France)

By the way, I think poll results like this are what slowed Linkspun down in regards to making it a Paid site:

- http://www.linkspun.com/forum/viewtopic ... w=viewpoll

drocd wrote:By the way, I think poll results like this are what slowed Linkspun down in regards to making it a Paid site:

- http://www.linkspun.com/forum/viewtopic ... w=viewpoll

Two issues with that

1) You can get all those features for less other places (as a SaaS or a dwnld app)
2) No one can test it/see it before they make up their mind (how things work is important for ppl, not just what is offered)

I suggest to code and implement those features so ppl can have a look before they buy.

willwank wrote:

drocd wrote:I suggest to code and implement those features so ppl can have a look before they buy.

This site isn't a money maker, Jdoughs basically made it as a service to himself and the adult industry.

I personally would be willing to pay a monthly or yearly fee.

If that is not done then maybe we can all put in some cash to get the updates done on what we need. a one time thing to help out with programming costs etc..

drocd wrote:By the way, I think poll results like this are what slowed Linkspun down in regards to making it a Paid site:

- http://www.linkspun.com/forum/viewtopic ... w=viewpoll

I think if 19% of their membersbase use the paid version thats a pretty good percentage.

If you and JDoughs aren't making $ with the site, why not monetize it? Even if it would be too unwieldy to charge for subscriptions, with all the webmaster/webmistress traffic, companies that market to this sector should be paying to advertise here, just as they do at adult forums. Or at the least, the ads should be webmaster referrals.

Companies DO pay to advertise here. All of those ads you see are paid for. THAT was a big reason the site is free with the options it currently has. It allowed DrocD to get paid for this programming work on the site. It paid the bill for some of the backend stuff that the site pays for, but doesn't charge for.

Paid options should be only for new features. This level of functionality should stay free. TBN died because of that.

We started free and it should stay free. Only new functionalities can become paid (in my book )

This is a great site, it's only fair for it to make some money. Maybe a pay-per-link arrangement. Something like the first 20 link trades free, then 5 trades for a dollar.

vrocks wrote:Companies DO pay to advertise here. All of those ads you see are paid for. THAT was a big reason the site is free with the options it currently has. It allowed DrocD to get paid for this programming work on the site. It paid the bill for some of the backend stuff that the site pays for, but doesn't charge for.

This is exactly right. Jdoughs paid out of his pocket initially for programming, the recouped those costs by selling ads on the site. Once he recouped the costs for ads I believe he did make a bit of money, but I'm sure it wasn't a lot compared to the time and support he had to put in here.

Everyone wants products for fee, especially because in the mainstream market we see so many VC start-ups that have these amazing products for free so we become accustomed to it. Put yourself in Jdoughs' shoes and imagine running a site that takes 4-6 hours a day to support for free or very little cash compensation. His motto was always that the friends and contacts he made in this link trading community would outweigh the time investment he puts in -but that lasts only so long.

Likewise, micro-payments like many companies are doing now ($1-5/month) are what people expect for services like this. That works great on huge scale with hundreds of thousands of subscribers in the mainstream world, but here we don't even have 3,000 free members (not sure how many of those are active traders).

I'm not saying that the site won't improve (if/when Jdoughs comes back), I'm just asking you people to be patient and understand what's going on behind the scenes. This site is Jdoughs' baby, and while my nickname may be familiar here, it's HIS site, and he does what HE chooses with it and I cannot speak for him.

__PMI__ wrote:Paid options should be only for new features. This level of functionality should stay free. TBN died because of that.

We started free and it should stay free. Only new functionalities can become paid (in my book )

Please note that Jdoughs has stated many times that if and when he adds paid features, only new features will become paid and he still wants the site to be very functional as a free site.

drocd wrote: Likewise, micro-payments like many companies are doing now ($1-5/month) are what people expect for services like this. That works great on huge scale with hundreds of thousands of subscribers in the mainstream world, but here we don't even have 3,000 free members (not sure how many of those are active traders).

You know what, maybe that's exactly where it should start. I'd be willing to pay a micro fee just to have access to the trading database, forget advanced features. It will raise some cash so more valuable features can be coded, implemented and shown to all members. You got to have money to make money.

drocd wrote: This is exactly right. Jdoughs paid out of his pocket initially for programming, the recouped those costs by selling ads on the site. Once he recouped the costs for ads I believe he did make a bit of money, but I'm sure it wasn't a lot compared to the time and support he had to put in here.

He isn't making that much. I bought a year of advertising for a very very low rate a few months ago. Much much less than pretty much everyone else is charging.

Guys is your business ) If you want to be a payment service because this is ideea with this thread why dont add payment/link added
Add to pay 0.1$/pages added/month
So for 40 links in my account i will pay 4$/month
Simple )
Who is with 4 pages will pay 0.4$/month
I this way everyone will pay.
If you add pay per month the same bucks for everyone,many will go out...why to pay 10$ if i have added only 1 page for trade...

In the last i agree to be added payment.
Guys the ideea is to pay so go on i want to update my page ranks lol )

i want to update my page ranks lol

Yeah.. me too

TB fell apart not because of wanting/needing to charge but because they let the system fall apart. It was not maintined and was getting all sorts of errors.

If this went to a paid system you would initially lose a lot of people because they want it for free. Well one way or another nothing in life is free. So you will either settle for a lesser system or come back and ultimately pay.

For me, I can sit here and in about 5 seconds of looking at my rankings in the SE's know that i would be more than willing to pay 50 or even 100 a month for this system. Would I prefer a lower amount, yes.

If I can pay 10 a month good. If not, this is well worth it.

If you can not afford to pay 10$ a month for the assistance that this site gives you, then simply put you are doing something wrong.

It's not about $10 or $100, it's about principle.

This system started free, people starting using it as a free and jdoughs promised it will remain free. And now when people are dependant on it, charge come in.

LS should be paid from the begining, not when people have no choice but to pay. I hate being forced to pay, even $1, but I like to pay $100 when I want.

A new server is not a problem financially, through the support of enough people. I would also pay $ 50 or more each month if it is invested in the development and performance. Let us consider sending to a server move is possible.

__PMI__ wrote:It's not about $10 or $100, it's about principle.

This system started free, people starting using it as a free and jdoughs promised it will remain free. And now when people are dependant on it, charge come in.

LS should be paid from the begining, not when people have no choice but to pay. I hate being forced to pay, even $1, but I like to pay $100 when I want.

For you it's principal. For me its income.. I make money from what I do and regardless of principal its worth it.

There is no point in debating about paid vs not paid right now. Just because all of these people are offering to chip in right now, it doesn't mean that all of the sudden LS is going to be a paid system.

Also, there is no point in talking about moving to a new server. I have no authority to do so, this is not my site and I don't get to make those choices.

Lastly, Page Rank. I can fix the page rank checker but I need one or two trusted LS users to host a script on multiple domains (unique IPs). We previously had about 10-15 but since all Jdoughs' domains expired they no longer work and thus the page rank checker is dead.

PR checker should be working now.

drocd wrote:PR checker should be working now.

Yes

BIG THANKS to Drocd for getting the PR checker working again. One thing that would be nice is if it checked the PR of requested trades when they are requested and once again when you review them (in case you review them weeks or months after the request was made).

But that will have to wait for Jdoughs to get back.

drocd wrote:PR checker should be working now.

You da Man.