Special Request 2022

We need your help.

Our site is not a commercial sales venture, but just a private research and social site. With the help of your donations, it’s largely paid for personally by my wife and me for the last 16 years. About 3 years ago we made a similar request and it appears we need to once again.

Our site is FREE to everyone interested in old firearms and currently we have over 35,000 members worldwide. As of today, out of that general membership, we have 173 members (less than 1/2%) who have graciously chosen to voluntarily donate a nominal amount of money, to help defray several thousand dollars in annual system bandwidth, server, disk storage, and maintenance costs. This special group receive additional recognition and access capabilities to the site and may be recognized but a colored "Contributing Member" banner panel under their name, as well as a unique color display of their chosen username.

Our site’s financial stability has generally worked out over the years, but there are times where our bank balance gets right to the bottom due to fewer contributions in a given year, and personally we’ve had to cover the shortfall in operating costs. That’s where we are today and combined with my young age of 74 and retirement translating to a lower monthly fixed income … well, to be honest, we need your help.

So, I would ask our entire membership to gauge the value of our site to their hobby and if they are able, please consider making a first-time donation, or if you’re already a Contributing Member and can afford it, perhaps make an additional special donation to get us through the current financial challenge. Any Donations (click here) automatically get added to your existing membership time. Even if we could get our Contributing Member group size up to a 1% level of total members, that would help keep us in the black.

For more information on How do I become a "Contributing Member" (click here)?

Finally, I’ve been given a lot of thought to the future of our site. My age combined with the fact I went through a triple bypass operation in 2018, leads me to consider passing the torch to younger leadership. My only concern is making sure our site has the right leadership going forward, so if you think you’d like to put a group together and become owner-operators, send me your thoughts, background and a business plan on how you see the future of what everyone has built here. I get emails all the time from various companies wanting to buy our site as they’ve done with the Gunboards web site and others, but we have no interest in selling out our members to commercial (for profit) bulletin board consolidation operators. We would pass the site on for free to the right group, who would take over the operating coats and continue with our legacy. Interested parties can email me at badger@milsurps.com

To everyone, thanks for your support over the years. :cheers:

Regards,
Doug (and Deborah)

The advice and knowledge I have gained from this forum has saved me a lot of money and helped me make good financial decisions when buying and conserving milsurp firearms. Well worth the donation I just made. Merry Christmas everyone!

Re-upped, thanks for all you do Doug!

Russ

Thanks for all you do, and have done for so long.

Done! Thanks for keeping this site going! It is a real life line to those of us who collect milsurp's in various parts of the globe.