On Dec 20, 2020, at 2:50 PM, billsf9c via groups.io <OOWONBS@...> wrote:

Google IPV6.
IP4 has fewer groups kf bits to define an  address.

IPV6 has significantly more, 
This allows more.addresses, and closer tracking too and.purportedly.serious beneficial ramifications for gov't surveillance, of a type... even suggesting backdoors.

BillSF9c

On Dec 20, 2020, at 2:41 PM, J_Catlady via groups.io <j.olivia.catlady@...> wrote:

Exactly right, another good point. Bad idea overall.
--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

On Dec 20, 2020, at 12:09 PM, PurplePenny <purplepenny@...> wrote:

I understand that this service has to pay for itself, and luckily my group is grandtfathered so this won't affect it.  However, if I were just thinking of moving to G.Io this would cost me nearly $2000 a year which would be prohibitively expensive for me.  I can' ask members for contributions: many of them are struggling finacially as it is.  One member sold her car to pay her vet bills, others do without their own healthcare to pay for their cats.  They just couldn't afford to donate, and I couldn't afford to pay $2000 from my own pocket.

As other have asked, I wonder which aspect is the most costly.  Could a lower cost per member with a tiered system for added benefits work?  For instance, my group only averages about 5 messages a day, but we do need to use photos and files. We do need occasionally need the message archive going back to the start of the group in 1999 (I had to do one just today!), but I think most message searches are within the last 5-10 years.

Penny

_.

On Dec 20, 2020, at 10:36 AM, Duane <txpigeon@...> wrote:

On Sun, Dec 20, 2020 at 10:52 AM, J_Catlady wrote:

Groups.io would presumably track the IP address.

IP tracking is inherently unreliable.  Anyone that has a dynamic address may have a different one every time they connect.  That's most of the world since there are a finite number of public IP addresses available.  IPV6 helps, but there are still many sites/browsers/etc. that are limited to using IPV4.

Duane

On Dec 20, 2020, at 9:27 AM, Drew <pubx1@af2z.net> wrote:

The option for group owners to directly pay for their group (Premium, Enterprise) would still be available. In that case membership would be a freebie for subscribers, regardless of their individual subscription level.

In other words, subscriptions in "paid" groups would not count toward individual subscribers' maximum groups limit. Only subscriptions in Basic (i.e., free-to-owner) groups would be counted.

Drew




In the case of an organization (club, business, etc) the owners of the group would have the option of paying for it and inviting y still have the option of paying for the group

On 12/20/20 11:49, Andy Wedge wrote:
On Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 11:43 PM, Drew wrote:
I wonder if Groups.io has considered charging subscribers directly
instead of charging group owners. It could be a multi-tier system,
for example:
- FREE: Subscriber can be a member of up to three Groups.io groups;
- $5.00/yr: ... up to ten groups;
- $10.00/yr: ... unlimited groups;
or whatever numbers make sense.
I can see issues with this where someone is subscribed to (using your example) 3 groups and then joins a club that has a membership fee and uses Groups.io for its communication. As a paid-up member of the club, that person should expect the same level of communication as every other member. If a club is prevented from adding (or inviting or approving a subscription request from) a paid-up member because that person already belongs to 3 other unrelated groups it creates a bad impression about Groups.io and a potential headache for the group admin.
Subscribers could always try and work around this by having multiple accounts from different email addresses but being pushed into that when they perhaps they don't want to create a new email address or are not technically capable of managing multiple addresses is not a good situation.
Andy

On Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 11:43 PM, Drew wrote:
I wonder if Groups.io has considered charging subscribers directly
instead of charging group owners. It could be a multi-tier system,
for example:
- FREE: Subscriber can be a member of up to three Groups.io groups;
- $5.00/yr: ... up to ten groups;
- $10.00/yr: ... unlimited groups;
or whatever numbers make sense.
I can see issues with this where someone is subscribed to (using your example) 3 groups and then joins a club that has a membership fee and uses Groups.io for its communication. As a paid-up member of the club, that person should expect the same level of communication as every other member. If a club is prevented from adding (or inviting or approving a subscription request from) a paid-up member because that person already belongs to 3 other unrelated groups it creates a bad impression about Groups.io and a potential headache for the group admin.
Subscribers could always try and work around this by having multiple accounts from different email addresses but being pushed into that when they perhaps they don't want to create a new email address or are not technically capable of managing multiple addresses is not a good situation.
Andy

I like the idea of having a method to accept donations - especially if the primary motivation is to support the group's existence on Groups.io. I've reminded people that Groups.io is and has been 100% free of advertisements. It's one of the few services left that is like that so in that regard it stands out from the rest.
I manage/maintain 3 different groups on Groups.io - all 3 revolve around amateur (ham) radio. Only one of the groups is in support of an amateur radio club that is 501(c)(3) non-profit and has an annual membership fee. The other two groups are merely discussion boards to support interest groups - definitely not anything even remotely resembling a club.
That said, there are group members that are willing to donate money to support the group's existence on this site. But without an integrated mechanism to support receiving monies, we have to resort to using something like Go Fund Me which is, in my opinion, overkill for the type of money we are talking about for a $220/year annual fee.
I've looked at solutions like Donorbox before but I'm not sure if there's a method for adding custom HTML to allow for adding a button to provide a mechanism to accept donations but I wouldn't be opposed to doing something like that. Hopefully that wouldn't violate terms of service.
It would be great for Group.io to offer an integration with Donorbox (or similar) for this purpose. Is this something that could be considered in the near future?