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I ran a forum with a decent amount of users as a kid some 15 years ago. We had no ads but once a year when the bills came through we'd have a donation drive to cover the hosting fees and sometimes upgrade our (paid) forum software. Was always weird when people sent letters with cash from all over the DACH area to me ;)

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I had a similar experience with my BBS. We did UUCP with some rather remote nodes and I had 11 incoming lines (the maximum BellSouth would install in a residence) so the bills were not trivial. Each month I’d post the prior month’s bill total and small checks and envelopes of cash would show up in my post office box soon after. It never made a wild profit, but there were only a couple of months where we couldn’t cover the bills.

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