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Comment by ofalkaed | Hacker News Reader

I really wish they would give up the ads and ask the community for support, I find it difficult to believe that they could not find funding for the site with all the various organizations out there in the bike community who just throw money at such things. A few years ago I could not take the ads on the site any longer and had to enable the ad block, quick look at a random page on the site (canti brake geometry) and ad block reports 30 ads blocked, a little ridiculous. I would pay for an ad free option. Perhaps they will start seeking alternative means now that Harris has closed down. Fantastic site and an invaluable resource to me over the years.

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Wow, the ads are new. Back when I used this site it was a delightfully clunky 1990s hyperlink encyclopaedia. I learned an incredible amount about threading sizes

I think I t was in part sponsored by Harris bike store which is no longer a going concern.

Sheldon’s Brown widow I think runs the site now. Prof Fell who taught one of my grad school CS classes.

It's mostly (all?) static content.

This should be cheap and easy to host behind a CDN like Cloudflare.

EDIT: I see it's a WordPress site and I take back what I said. WordPress is a nightmare to maintain.

If the site isn't being updated any more, it could be run through one of the wordpress-to-static-site generator things and hosted as you'd describe, though.

Who's "they"?

The bottom of each page has a "Last updated" timestamp (recent) by Harriet Fell. I think this is she: https://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/fell . Perhaps Sheldon's surviving spouse?

On same pages, the person mentioned is John Allen while on others it says Harriet Fell. I’m not sure I’d trust this footer to be accurate as the “Last Updated” time-stamp is generated server-side to reflect the current time.

Well done on finding Harriet’s own home page. I really like the no-frills, non-fussy presentation style.

Yeah the ads have gotten insane. The site didn’t used to be like this. Now I get dedicated ad-pages when I click a link, and I have to click through to continue to the page I was trying to get to. That’s… excessive.

A banner ad at the top of each page should be more than enough to fund a static site like this (with extra for the authors efforts).

I got a popup ad when I clicked a link.

After I dismissed that ad and was actually taken to the link I clicked, the top of the page had a creepy anime dating sim ad that seemed barely SFW.

Another page had four banner ads.

Surely just a small handful of folks donating a few bucks through patreon or whatever, could keep the site ticking over with no ads.

If you tried running anything on user donations, you would see that users are not that generous.

My website has generated quite a bit of goodwill in my community. It saves people considerable stress.

Donations make up less than a percent of my income. About one in ten or twenty thousand visitors donates. It does not cover my grocery bill. Even readers I personally advise rarely donate.

Tbf for a static website without crazy levels of traffic, a weeks worth of groceries is probably more than hosting costs for a year.

It may be more than the _hosting_ cost, but what about the labour in actually generating that insight or maintaining and updating the content. Or what about recompense for, you know, providing such value in the first place?

'The bare minimum hosting cost' is a pretty poor bar for informational content.

In the case of the Sheldon Brown website, the creator died 15 years ago. This is merely an archive of his work since no updates have been made since then.

John Allen has been updating the website since 2010. It seems like most people think the site should have been left alone, though.

Ah. I had no idea.

I wonder what Sheldon would have wanted. I was always under the impression that he saw it as a community service. Despite working at a bike shop he never seemed to push parts sales in his writings.

I took the parent's comment to be about recovering costs of operation, not supporting oneself.

I think its entirely possible to recover the costs of a hobby that does public good through donations. Making a reasonable wage (especially by software dev standards) is another matter entirely.

The website costs 10€ a month to keep alive. Unfortunately its author also needs to be kept alive.

the author has been dead for 15 years, though others have shared that some updates have been done over the years

I'm sure that I'm not the only person in this thread, who spent many hours absorbing content from this free resource as a cash-strapped cyclist back in the day, and who now makes enough money in an hour or two to run this site for a year.

Donations seem to do fine for my local makerspace, and local cycling advocacy group. Maybe this site, which for a lot of people would amount to an online memorial, is somehow different?

Everyone likes to say they’d contribute - but the percentage of people who are actually willing to put there hands in their pockets is minuscule.

I have some insight into this and it's not good. Quite a while back I supported a charitable drive for a good cause on a well known site (you'll have heard of it).

So, total donations were by about 20 people who really funded all of it, the total take for that was distinctly under £1000. At the time that site had between 2 and 4 million views a month. tl;dr few people will consider paying, far fewer will actually pay, even when it benefits them in the long term.

What really upset me about that is if everyone who looked at that charitable request and had simply coughed up £1, and most of them could (sometimes you can't; I've been in that position so I understand) a real difference could have been made.

If a charitable health-based cause pulls in so little cash, even fewer people will donate just to keep a site running.

I have just visited the site, and I did not see any ads. But then I have uBlock installed in my Firefox.

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