Site Donations

[webmaster]

Recently several generous forum members tried using our "Donate" button to make a donation to help this site running. Although they received a confirmation of their donation the connection to PayPal failed and the payments were never completed.

After some digging I found that the old donation system on this site was no longer compatible with PayPal and another way to accept donations was needed.

I've now setup a Patreon option to replace PayPal. Patreon is a popular and reputable system that allows visitors to join and automatically make a small monthly donation to help support their favorite creators or websites. To help support this site you can make a donation of as little as $2/month or enter any amount you like. The monthly donation can be discontinued at any time and all donations will go directly to the expenses related to operating this site and server.

As an added benefit to being a Patreon member of this forum I've created a new private forum area exclusively for our Patreon supporters where discussions about topics unrelated to the Lakes Region are allowed. I hope that access to this open forum area will be another incentive to join our Patreon and see what's going on in there.

Since I started it 30 years ago this site's expenses were always covered by advertising and some donations. Recently the advertising has dried up and Lakes Region businesses no longer seem very interested in advertising here, even though the cost is only a few dollars a day and we get lots of traffic. I'm not very good at marketing the advertising and that may be part of the problem. I tried adding Google ads but it seems that many of you now block those ads and the income from them is minimal. I will always appreciate the donations I've received through PayPal and do have a few other ideas to offset the growing expenses that I'll be trying soon.

The future of the site really depends on finding a way to cover the growing expenses. I am now paying almost all of the site's expenses out of my pocket. Now that I'm 5 years into retirement I have to decide if I can continue doing that indefinitely.

If you are a regular visitor to the site please consider becoming a Patreon member and making a small donation every month to help keep this site operating. If we can get 100 members donating a small amount monthly it will keep the site and forum running.

The "Donate" links on the site have been updated to Patreon and here's the link for you Tapatalk users:

https://www.patreon.com/winnipesaukeeforum

Update: Patreon does not provide for one-time donations so here's a link where you can do that:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hoste...=DSEEMJMVCMYVW