How to get a shiny gold bar to your avatar just like me? You might be looking at my avatar and wonder how YOU might get a nice shiny gold bar to your avatar just like me and be recognized as a Sim Racing Online donator? It's simple ... al you have to do is donate a certain amount of money to your favourite racing website Sim Racing Online and your name will be gold plated JUST LIKE MINE !! Not only will you attract the attention of all our female members ... You will also be supporting our monthly multiple server payments !! Isn't that killing two birds with one stone?! You can race here for free, but we do need a little bit of help to pay the bills with multiple servers running. Now don't expect a lifetime gold bar for just a single 1 dollar donation. If you want to stay shiny, there has to be a small amount donated ever so often. Then, not only will that gold bar stick to your name like glue, but everyone can see that you are helping out a great community! Stay well and see you on track! John van der Geest Staff Member
That's what scares me off a bit. Actually I'm not interested in other members donating behavior and I dont think it's any of other member's concern if I donate or not. That's a private matter between a member and the staff, so I don't think that the whole idea of getting a gold bar to an avatar is such a good idea. It feels like publicly pillory someone. RaceConnect had the same idea, but went down anyway. Not saying that SRO should go down, but I have my doubts if it improves the situation. Normally when I race I make a donation. I don't expect to race for free, but you always find people who try to take advantage of the situation. If everyone takes their responsibility, then it should work out fine. However, a site like SRO should always reckon with shortfall. What happens if people don't want to donate enough and drift away? Then you still have the change that SRO goes down or the staff has to cover the costs. A tough call. My suggestion: Bring down the number of sims to the most popular two or so, most sites host one or two sims. Also reduce the number of races. Hosting races on a (almost) daily basis is too much. Looking at the upcoming events, most races are below 15 attendees. RaceConnect made the mistake trying to host all the sims out there and expected full grids on the same level. That's not gonna work; you can't please everyone. Besides, hosting races with less than 10 people is not very encouraging for members to attend, so forget about these donations. I understand that it's not SRO's policy, but trying to host so much sims bring in extra costs which should be covered for, so more donations are needed. I don't think it's the right way to go. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the effort all the staff members make, but reducing things might help to control the situation better. Just my 2 cents.
First, thank you very much for your valuable feedback. If you donate and do not want the recognition then we will accommodate your request and remove the badge. The idea of the badge is to recognize those members who are willing to financially support our operations. Our costs are hardware and software only. There are no salaries or other such costs. We do not wish to place advertisements on our website or make a profit of any kind. We want our operating costs to be covered by the members who use our service and not by just a small number of members and mostly by the owners and Admins. Reducing the number of events will not reduce our costs. Our costs are fixed no matter how many events we run. But as we continue to grow we want to look ahead to the future and begin to plan for the possibility of adding another race server. And as our site grows and we have to accommodate more visitors to our site, we may someday find ourselves needing to upgrade our hardware to handle the site traffic. We have also discussed the idea of awarding trophies and other prizes to series winners in recognition of their hard work and brilliant driving. But again, those prizes cost money. We want to expand our website and offer more features. Fortunately your programmers work for free but sometimes the software they use costs money. SRO has been dealing with shortfall since day 1. We've had a couple of months were donations have covered our costs but it is very rare. If people don't want to donate, that is fine. Our service will still be free for them and in the end, our owners and Admins will pick up the cost so everyone can have a great experience racing at SRO.
I had a bad experience in the past with this idea, wich lead to some members of another online site to cheat to gain the prizes.
There are no cheaters at SRO. No way. Our drivers are honest people. You should stay away from that other online site
We have run competitions in the past with out any problems what so ever, As Mark stated we do not have cheaters at SRO
