Time to think about a change

Bild des Benutzers michael

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I'm beginning to block friends of our hobby to use the catalog. I do not like to do it and it stops friendships I have made in the past. But what to do with collectors who do not realize that this catalog is expensive and needs a lot of work?

To build it up, to run and to keep this catalog up to date costs money and time. I wrote it in many articles, that we are talking about 4500€ for the start, anual cost of 720€ and about 3000 hours of my work for programming and merging the labels in best quality. And you know, the money I already spend is not the issue I'm talking about, it is about how we continue having done this invest.

There are some collectors who help in the cost and help in keeping the catalog up to date. First of all Peter and Bert. But not many do follow this example. When you put the collectors who contribute in a row, than at position 5 or 6 we talk about only 20€ a year and adding more or less 20 labels at all. At position 10 you will find no contibution worth mentioning. At position 15 of the 231 members there are no verifications, no comments, just nothing. The ratio between supporters and beneficaries is completly the wrong way.

This year about 2700 new labels are issued. It is a lot of work to insert all this new labels into our catalog with great care. I keep on going, because it is so much important to have this huge catalog for our hobby. We will loose the orientation, when we not keep track what we find in the world. Last year we had nearly 28,000 sessions of collectors searching in the catalog. Each month 74GB of data are transfered from this catalog to the computer screens of the collectors. There are at this second 135 request- and whishlists at the trade page, that means about 70 trades are negotiated right now with the help of this website. This catalog is well used, nobody likes to see all the blurry WhatsApp pictures any more having now 2700 new labels each year.

Many of my 'friends' think, they can get this for free. But to tell you the truth: I do miss their support. So far I do not have any benefit it doing all this. Even not a small advantage when trading banana labels.

What to do with collectors in our community who take much more then they give to run this catalog of all known banana labels with the brilliant trade page? What I can promise, is that the door is never closed when you are blocked. Let us find a way that both sites are happy. And of course, the much better idea is to avoid this situation at all.

OK?