We wanted to provide a quick summary of our first (nearly full year) of running the Gasroom.
As most regular posters know, @bluequarters and I took over the running of the forum rather suddenly, without much time to prepare. However, we feel its mostly been successful, and we’ve really enjoyed it.
- August was our busiest traffic month, with over 8,500 posts created and 1.4 million pageviews generated
- Although interestingly June was the month with the highest visitor count at 13,150 users
- Over 600 users have registered for an account, and 38 are paid subscribers
- We have built good ties with W3 and the Foundation (with help from @StevePeart), the Trust, The Wanderer, @TheQuartermen, The 1887, @wycombeweekly , and ChairboysArchive, and are keen to do more with them all in 2026.
- We’re proud of the Hub, mostly led by @bluequarters, and envisage it eventually becoming the homepage of the site.
- The fundraisers for sponsoring W3 and Fink were both great, and the benefits included the player meet and quiz event attended by myself, @Ozzie_the_Relaxed and @Atomic, with tickets for the end of season awards dinner also up for grabs.
- Thanks to @BSE for moderating and creating match day threads, @DevC and @railwaysteve for running their respective competitions, and @Atomic for the man of the match polls.
- We are still looking at bringing on original content creators to write opinion and data pieces, match reports, transfer rumours or historical pieces for the Hub too.
- We got the Christmas lights back!
Thank you to everyone who visits the site, and especially to all our subscribers! I really believe its one of the best football forums online.
We’ve had a few mis-steps and flops along the way though:
I made the decision to invest significant funds into ad technology that turned out to be mostly incompatible with Discourse. In fact, the the more we tried working with ad tech providers, the more we realised Discourse is a very ad-hostile platform. This is due to its strict content security policy and single page architecture for those interested in the technical side of things.
In hindsight, we probably would have gone with different software, if we’d had more time to research providers. We did consider migrating to new forum software a second time, but decided that Discourse is one of the best providers in terms of core forum functionality and user experience. We also felt we might lose members and subscriber goodwill if we undertook another migration, especially if there were technical issues.
As a result of the very underwhelming ad revenues, we recover our costs almost entirely through subscriptions. If you are on the fence about subscribing, and decided to just contribute via viewing ads, please re-consider your position. Subscription revenues allow us to recoup the not insignificant costs of running a self-hosted version of Discourse, which includes web and email hosting fees, developer hours, stats and content feeds on the Hub, and the minor admin costs of operating a limited company and filing tax returns.
We are not trying to turn a profit to keep for ourselves - any spare subscription revenue will be re-invested into the site, the women’s team, or other benefits for forum members. Excess subscription money also allows us to try new, more interesting things, such as our live-streaming of W3 games, developing new site sections and features on the hub, or potentially running competitions, creating Gasroom match day 1887 flags etc.
The shop has also not been a success, and we will be deactivating it shortly. We will keep it dormant, and look at doing occasional small items in the future such as stickers, hats, or mugs around big occasions like as cup runs or play-off finals (should we be so lucky).
We also have 8 match day tickets as part of our Fink player sponsorship. Given most subscribers are likely season ticket holders, we are not sure how to best utilise these.
We are considering running a ballot for members, or alternatively offering them to users who are struggling financially with the cost of living crisis, who aren’t able to attend games regularly. We are open to suggestions!
Which makes it a pleasure to use.