WormHole's Final Announcement
With great sadness and heaviness of heart I regretfully have to announce that XMBG will be closing for good on or about June 23rd. Some of you may
remember last September when all the fighting broke out here and the site was in turmoil where I was battling people throughout several different
threads. Through all this and the high running of emotions coupled with the stress of being overworked running this site at a rate that was increasing
with each passing month that I let it be known that through all this my personal life was also in jeopardy and that my wife and I were facing the
possibility of losing our home. So I proceeded with my original plan for XMBG to be a paid site and I made it so. Well the time has now come that
losing our house has become a sure reality and that now I'm faced with us splitting up and me being homeless. So with no home for me XMBG cannot
continue. I have been striving for several years to get something going online to earn money by providing services to people who need them. But the
general consensus of the xmb community is that all of us who provide these services should do this for free regardless of the personal stakes
involved. And, in my humble opinion, this is not right. All of us people who provide these services and write these hacks for you to use, I feel,
should be paid for doing so. I heard it all last year when I turned XMBG into a pay site that installing hacks is nothing and takes no time to do. In
a small way this is true. Some of the hacks don't take long to install while some can take up to a half an hour. And I have seem many people mess up
even the simplest of hacks. So if I, or others like me, can do something that you can't do, then why shouldn't we be compensated? If you drive a car
and can't perform the simplest of maintenance on it then you take it to a garage and pay someone to do it for you. Am I not corrected on this? Then
why should perfoming online services for something you can't or don't want to do be any different? As I said, I heard that it doesn't take that
much time to install hacks. But when I was doing it for 18+ hours a day like I was a year ago then I was working a full time job with overtime and
doing it for free. And that is just insane. I never worked that hard when I worked in the brick and mortar world.
My original plan for XMBG was to be a paid site and have people who wanted to work and get paid for it. But in the beginning I had to test the waters
first to see if this would be feasible to do. And I did it for a year and a half before I started charging for hack installations and I felt that
making some money doing this for people could be a possibility. So last September I started charging for hack installations. That month showed promise
by bringing in just a little over $600 coupled with donations. But the illusion was shattered the next month and each month thereafter as I watched
the monthly income drop by anywhere from 50 to 75 percent until it bottomed out this past March when I closed XMBG for a short while. In terms of
reality people do not want to pay for my services and I got the feeling that I am expected to do all this for free. Last November I obtained a
dedicated server which allowed me to get out from under a reseller contract and lowered my monthly hosting fees. I had a plan to offer quality but
inexpensive hosting services to people in hopes that it would start generating some income for me and hopefully stave off the prospect of losing my
home. Before I started taking on xmb users as hosting customers my original customer base was bringing in just enough to cover my server fees with a
small profit. But when I started taking on xmb users it has become almost every month since November that the majority of them are slow in paying or
don't pay at all forcing me to have to cover them. The idea of being in business is to make money, not lose it. Like the hack installations I'm not
charging an arm and leg. Installation requests were anywhere from $3 to $10 depending on the hacks requested and my hosting fees are $5 a month for
ample space with everything you could want or need for personal hosting. With the amount of space I have on one drive on the server and I could sell
it at $5 a pop for 500 megs of space I could almost be making what I needed to be making a month to avoid this financial distress that we are now
going through.
I had a former staff member who had promised to help me get the hosting business going and promote it but for whatever reasons he has abandoned the
project and left me hanging. And just prior to that all the problems with my father came about and I've been devoting my energy to my parents and
their needs. And since I don't handle the household finances I wasn't fully aware of how bad things have really gotten. I would see signs that maybe
things weren't quite this bad. My wife makes almost $60,000 a year at her job but she's had 3 major surgeries in the past 5 years. And even though
she has medical insurance there were still hefty medical bills put upon us. And this past February she changed jobs from a company she worked at for
many years to a job in the same field at about the same pay but it, too, has turned out to be a financial disaster with her insurance costs ending up
costing more, her medications now costing more and the promise of more overtime work now not being available. And there's the rising cost of gas and
utilities in general that eat more and more of the income. And with me being just a couple months shy of turning 50 and not working in the real world
now for several years it is going to be extremely difficult for me to go out and find a job where I won't be working just to drive to work. The
majority of all this is my fault because I was determined to get a home-based business established and it has failed at the turn of every corner and
has cost me the loss of my home where I had hoped to live out the rest of my life and it has cost me the love of my life who was my high school
sweetheart. Many of you know that I was a professional musician for about 30 years. I retired from that 3 years ago because I'm getting older and
it's a younger person's world. Plus I got very burned out from the bar and club scene putting up with drunk people all the time and incorrigible
musicians that just made playing more stressful than it really should be. But at the time I quit I walked away from a gig that was paying me about
$2000 a month and had that for about 7 years and would most likely still be doing the same gig today. I quit because the pressure of playing 4 nights
a week was getting to be too much with all the variables to deal with and to concentrate on getting a business going. I wanted to do something that I
enjoyed doing while affording me the opportunity to get out of the rat race. So along with my struggling hosting business I started XMBG. I started 5
years ago by provide support at xmb and xmbhacks and after doing that for about 3 years I decided I could do this and more from the comfort of my own
site. I enjoy working with the software. I enjoy installing hacks and really believed that there could be some money made while doing it. Afterall
there are other board software programs that have people doing installations and creating themes and getting paid good money to do it. So I thought I
could do the same with the xmb software. Boy was I ever wrong in that assessment.
But now after 2+ years of XMBG it has come down to the fact that it's not going to happen. It's not going to be what I envisioned. While XMBG was a
paid service I got into the Google Adsense and while people thought they were helping by clicking on ads it ended up costing me the loss of over $350
in revenue for the first month because Google determined that it was all fraudulent click throughs. So the next month I had Guldan sign up for a
Google account and the same thing happened with me losing another $100 or so in revenue. So I looked around for alternatives and joined Yahoo!'s
advertising program. Well in 6 months it's only generated $41.83. At this rate it's going to take a year to get to the necessary $100 mark to get a
pay out. If people didn't want to pay for my services and would merely click 1 or 2 ads each day or whenever they visit the site that would generate
a bit of substantial revenue. But with Google I had people actually tell me they were hammering the ads. The intention was good but it cost me to lose
the money and my account(s) with Google. I have a Donations button for those who would like to help out but anymore I'm lucky if 1 or 2 donations
come in a month. Just take a look at the XMBG Benefactor List. Up until about a month ago before I pruned the members list I had over 2000 members and
only 65 have donated. That's less than 3%. Realistically speaking that's not enough to inspire me in keeping things going but yet I have done so.
So not only because of my current situation of losing my place to live, and without housing there can be no more XMBG, there's just nothing else to
keep me inspired to continue on. And there's no one else that knows all the inner workings and the procedures of the behind the scenes and day to day
operations of XMBG. The work and time involved to run this site along with the money it does cost it is not feasible to continue even if my living
situation was different. I have worked this site for free for far too long and I can't continue it any longer. I have to now put my energy towards my
life and whatever I can come up with to survive. I will probably start shutting things down a few days prior to June 23rd as I prepare to leave my
home and go off into the unknown. It's a scary thought to not have any control over your life and not knowing what is going to happen.
So with this final thought I leave you all with a word of advice. Always take care of yourself first and foremost and be sure that you have all your
bases covered. You never know what life is going to throw at you and it's best if you are prepared. Do not rely on anyone when the chips are down as
only you are the only one that can truly take care of yourself. If you are in a relationship with someone be sure that if the bottom falls out that
you have yourself covered. And if you are the one that is reliant on someone for support don't get complacent and thinking it will always be there
for you. It can be taken away from you at anytime. So try to be self-reliant so that you aren't left high and dry and have to give up or lose
everything you own and everything you know and love.
PLEASE DO NOT U2U ME FOR GENERAL SUPPORT ISSUES!!!
Growing old is only going back to where you're from.
~Kansas~
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WormHole
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Posted on 6-7-2006 at 11:39 PM
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Jeannie-tea
If you need whatever, just write me a message 
