Transparency On The Future of ATS

Ok this legit made me cry.

ATS did a lot for me in so many ways. I grew up on a personal level on here and thanks to many great threads by current and long lost members I finally understood a part of myself I use to keep hidden. Here I met people like me with my views and my experiences. I didn’t feel alone here. I made lots of friends on here and many I consider my best friends even if we have never met. They are closer to me and my life than family and therefore they are my family.

I really don’t know what to say....this is sad. I may not post like I use to but I check almost daily to see the top threads or I go read more of Skyfloating’s threads or the one on Stargates being real. I’m still not done with it! I click all links in it and well it’s taken me down some cool rabbit holes. I’m so going to miss that....

Its hard to swallow. I have learnt so much on this site... how to think critically, how to evaluate, amazing knowledge etc.

I believe that with this site closing it would be a big marker for the end of the internet (as we know it). This site is the reason one can see different opinions and learn about certain truths (conspiracies) that you otherwise probably wouldnt know.

IT makes sense, the powers that be would not like sites like this one to exist, and it seems they will be getting what they want. It is a real shame, but the truth is, imo this is just the start of a big change in the world. A stranglehold on truth so that the new world order can finally complete their masterplan, to control minds totally.

I am still trying to digest.... i never thought this would actually happen, but hey it is 2020 so im not surprised.

I wish i had some amazing suggestion or idea to help this site keep going. The only thing i have is a mate who is a wizard at getting internet traffic for companies' profiles on social media sites. He really is good at it. I dont know if that will help, if it will msg me.

Anyways skeptic. I hope we still can somehow keep going....

originally posted by: JinMI

originally posted by: Lumenari
a reply to: SkepticOverlord

Change your business model to a paid membership with boards that are only available for paid members.

Keep the ones now available free with ad revenue and for God's sake, change your site so that you can't view with an ad blocker.

That isn't hard to do.

That being said,I would pay $10 a month for the subscription all day long.

That's the same as Netflix for me... which I use like 5 times a year.

I'd probably pay double that for keeping ATS going.

Just a thought.

This and open it up to cryptocurrency. For starters, Basic Attention Token, which is designed for this type of capital generation.

I would pay $20 for ATS to be like the old days! It would be part of my budget like power and water lol

originally posted by: mamabeth
a reply to: sapien82

I would be willing to pay ATS $10.00 per month.

Me too! I would even pay $20!

originally posted by: mblahnikluver

originally posted by: JinMI

originally posted by: Lumenari
a reply to: SkepticOverlord

Change your business model to a paid membership with boards that are only available for paid members.

Keep the ones now available free with ad revenue and for God's sake, change your site so that you can't view with an ad blocker.

That isn't hard to do.

That being said,I would pay $10 a month for the subscription all day long.

That's the same as Netflix for me... which I use like 5 times a year.

I'd probably pay double that for keeping ATS going.

Just a thought.

This and open it up to cryptocurrency. For starters, Basic Attention Token, which is designed for this type of capital generation.

I would pay $20 for ATS to be like the old days! It would be part of my budget like power and water lol

Yeah, it's more expensive than $20 right Skeptic? #, is ATS that cheap to you?

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

I have to agree. I work for a SaaS company with a much larger main database and even higher availability contract. We pay about $55K a month in AWS but we are probably 1000x larger than ATS in terms of data and processing power.

We have a micro-service architecture so we run many dockers across many EC2 instances. Most of our cost is high because we use a lot of VMs, way more than ATS would ever need. We have dev VMs, QA VMs, Prod VMs, etc. We also allow uploading of video content and other data which we feed into AWS S3. We are at about 50TB a month (ATS is at 3TB total?). We do nearly a quarter billion requests for S3 objects a month.

Here are our costs for May.



The Relational Database Service (RDS) DBs you see in this are not our main DBs. Those are just used by two of our many micro-services. You can see that is about the size ATS would require, maybe more (need more info to know). So about $550 a month. If you use RDS then you could use much smaller EC2 instances for the web servers because you won't also be running a DB server on it.

Our main DB uses the Elastic File System (EFS) which you can see the cost for above. It is connected to multiple Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances running our DB master and slave servers multiplied by two for load balancing. More than ATS would need. Out of the $39K in the bill you see for (EC2) our main DB system is about $4k of that a month. ATS would not require anywhere near that.

As for our Simple Storage Service (S3) you can see we pay $2000 a month for more requests and data than ATS could ever use (unless they start to allow HD video uploads).

I could probably get ATS running on AWS for under $5k a month, probably less.

a reply to: More1ThanAny1


$5,000 a month...what is your profit?

I'm a little late to this discussion so I'm sure countless others have said the same things I am, but I would gladly pay a monthly subscription fee or make regular donations to help keep the site afloat.

I haven't been very active in posting for a long time, but ATS feels like my second home. I've been a member here for over 10 years under this account, and several years before that under a previous account. The knowledge and insight I've gained from the discussions here over the years are priceless, and the friendships I've made even more so. Despite my lack of posting, I still fall asleep every single night browsing the forums on my phone. ATS has been a daily part of my life since I was in high school and to lose it now would be a tragedy.

Skeptic Overlord / Owners of ATS,

Allow me to toss out an idea for your input.

Let's say we (members) could come up with $250,000 in cash (CAPEX), and create a model of $5,000, to $7,500 per month in operating funds (OPEX) with no advertising at all, just from membership. Would you (ATS) be amenable to providing the existing database? Say we called it something else like, I don't know, ATS 2.0, or 'Martians from Venus'; this way you could preserve your marketing rights for 'Above Top Secret'.

As Lee Iacocca was famous for saying..."It's salami slicing time, boys, so let's get on with it!"

What say you?

originally posted by: AdmireTheDistance
I'm a little late to this discussion so I'm sure countless others have said the same things I am, but I would gladly pay a monthly subscription fee or make regular donations to help keep the site afloat.

I haven't been very active in posting for a long time, but ATS feels like my second home. I've been a member here for over 10 years under this account, and several years before that under a previous account. The knowledge and insight I've gained from the discussions here over the years are priceless, and the friendships I've made even more so. Despite my lack of posting, I still fall asleep every single night browsing the forums on my phone. ATS has been a daily part of my life since I was in high school and to lose it now would be a tragedy.

Me too, with conditions, we members should vote in moderators...it's our decision to let in, and get out. With that, I can handle any weirdos here but I need fair and a just site. My only request.

a reply to: More1ThanAny1

So 1-2k a month, just how do we make avg the site making 50 dollars a day to exist figure 20% profit at 300 dollars for the time and upkeep just to start, what produces 50 dollars a day to exist?

I only ever really participate in current conversations.
I think moving the chat to discord would be better feel.
Could program bots, and what not, for the scoring features, which is cool about ATS.
It's great to have the archive at hand, but high availability and redundancy may be over kill.

a reply to: SkepticOverlord

Good evening;

I’m sorry to hear this. My lottery dream (or one of them, anyway) was to buy the site and a special RV meant to track UFOs. Sadly I don’t have the lottery winnings to do this.

On a serious note, in my original iteration 10 years ago I was a finalist for your radio show. I recognize that it did not do too well, but I am curious as to why you haven’t expanded into the realm of podcasts. This is a growing market, and quite frankly there are enough threads archived that the content would seem to fill itself. I am happy to audition once again, as in the interim I have been a finalist for a Peabody, and my writing earned a Pulitzer nod. (Obvi I can prove this)

Ironically, I was banned from the site 10 years ago (I’ve been upfront about this) due to a heated convo about abortion- something I’ve learned to mellow out about in common discourse. But I still feel there is an audience for this content, and a family of podcasts might be it. Revenue streams could be shared once the audience is built, and I feel as though there are some quality editors available on this site who would gladly do the work in exchange for future crumbs.

I believe diversification might be the mid-to-long term answer here.

TAG, you’re it.

originally posted by: Bicent
a reply to: More1ThanAny1

So 1-2k a month, just how do we make avg the site making 50 dollars a day to exist figure 20% profit at 300 dollars for the time and upkeep just to start, what produces 50 dollars a day to exist?

Yeah, right!

a reply to: SkepticOverlord

Oh, that sucks.

originally posted by: rom12345
I only ever really participate in current conversations.
I think moving the chat to discord would be better feel.
Could program bots, and what not, for the scoring features, which is cool about ATS.
It's great to have the archive at hand, but high availability and redundancy may be over kill.

Do you need real debate without limits?

a reply to: rom12345

I agree I think discord when the site disappears is where we should go. It’s sad, ole ats I will miss, but I dunno, how this place can make money without a big investment, a loss and allot of risk.

originally posted by: Bicent
a reply to: rom12345

I agree I think discord when the site disappears is where we should go. It’s sad, ole ats I will miss, but I dunno, how this place can make money without a big investment, a loss and allot of risk.

Free speech and free debate without interruption would be a start.

originally posted by: InTheLight

originally posted by: Bicent
a reply to: rom12345

I agree I think discord when the site disappears is where we should go. It’s sad, ole ats I will miss, but I dunno, how this place can make money without a big investment, a loss and allot of risk.

Free speech and free debate without interruption would be a start.

There are some pretty gnarly servers on discord, ATS, type stuff us pretty tame.

a reply to: SkepticOverlord

To you Skeptic O...cruel summer coming, or not, your decision. Don't go!