A note about front page minutes

Ian,

What I meant to say is that for the Voipuser.org "subscriber", both the DID and the incoming calls are at no cost to the subscriber.

So, just to clarify for myself, the cost of a call is born by the person who originates the call. Is that what you mean by "incoming calls are not free".

I guess, whether the call is incoming or outgoing depends on which end of the call you are on

Also, given that the "owner" of a number (in this case 0870) gets a percent of the call, how much does it cost to "own" a number?

Thanks,

p2pvoice

Yes, you are not paying anything to have the incoming numbers or make the outbound calls.

But, if you have people call you on your voipuser.org numbers, some of the cost of the call goes to voipuser.org and goes into the "pot" for outgoing calls.

--ian

Today there are 55000 minutes in the community pot. Last month, there were 75000 minutes.

Am I right?

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people are being fair and reasonable with outbound useage, that really does help.

Are we still being fair?

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Are we still being fair?

I honestly can't say that anyone is being totally unreasonable

But yes, we're down, and we need to bring the pot back up a bit.

I'll be posting about this tonight, and we'll probably drop a friendly mail off to all the users of the outbound service. It would be great if people could drop back on their outbound calling by about 30% or so.

We're also looking at a PayPal donation option for the members that have requested it.

No need for panic yet, we just need to keep an eye on it.

I'm glad that people are actually tracking the front page minutes though - a bit of awareness of what it was beginning of last month, and beginning of this month is a good thing.

Thanks,

Dean

dean :

Quote: Are we still being fair? I honestly can't say that anyone is being totally unreasonable But yes, we're down, and we need to bring the pot back up a bit. I'll be posting about this tonight, and we'll probably drop a friendly mail off to all the users of the outbound service. It would be great if people could drop back on their outbound calling by about 30% or so.

That makes sense, doesn't it? VoIPUser growths every month and last month, February 2005, I thought I saw somewhere mentioning the growth on that month was more than 10%.

[quote="dean"]

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We're also looking at a PayPal donation option for the members that have requested it. No need for panic yet, we just need to keep an eye on it. I'm glad that people are actually tracking the front page minutes though - a bit of awareness of what it was beginning of last month, and beginning of this month is a good thing. Thanks, Dean

May be PayPal is the solution; however, there are a lot of people out here (there) won't even let PayPal touch their credit cards, less the checking accounts.

mazilo :

That makes sense, doesn't it? VoIPUser growths every month and last month, February 2005, I thought I saw somewhere mentioning the growth on that month was more than 10%

Yeah, but you would hope that the growth would bring it more incoming minutes thus making the pot bigger - or at least the same.

But, obviously this month, 20,000 more outgoing minutes have been used than incoming minutes generated.

--ian

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May be PayPal is the solution; however, there are a lot of people out here (there) won't even let PayPal touch their credit cards, less the checking accounts.

We can't cater for everybody and I wouldn't expect to be able to. If someone doesn't want to make a donation by PayPal, can't generate any inbound minutes and doesn't want to do anything else to support this community, then that's ok by us. If they can't make it work for them, there isn't much more we can do for them. Ultimately they won't be able to use services we offer.

The main VSP's take credit cards though, it's not as if there are no other options.

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last month, February 2005, I thought I saw somewhere mentioning the growth on that month was more than 10%.

Over 1,000 people joined in February. Inbound revenue has gone up, it's only a bit out of balance (a little under 30% defecit). We have other options, but ultimately if people can drop back their useage just a small amount each day, we'll be OK.

Dean

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There are 38400 minutes in the community pool

Is that correct?

Voditrord - see first post in this thread.

It's as correct as it can be at any given moment. It's only a guide.

I know it, Dean.

My point is that yesterday there were about 25000 minutes or something like that, and today is the first monday in this month.

So I thought that maybe today the front page would show the right number.

My question should have been: are we still going down? (it seems so).

Yes, I think we're still dropping a little bit, but not all funds/minutes have been added just yet.

Dean

I have noticed the minutes on the front page display dropping a lot, it seems that by the end of the month we are going to go out of minutes, i want to donate but i don´t have a paypal account or a credit card yet.

Can i donate through a friend account?

I have an hour or two a day of calls coming on the 07031 number and don't use the Voip system more than ten to twenty minutes a day for outgoing calls.

So I am contributing a lot minutes to the community pool.

My credit stands on 10 all the time and I wonder if there has been any thoughts around how to make some "slightly" more expensive calls available to users like myself ?

The 10 minutes outgoing limit is fine, most calls can be sorted in that time. But the inconvenience of not being able to call 0870 and 0845 numbers that a lot of organisations are using is a bit more complicated to live with.

And mobile phones.

Maybe Voipuser can open up for these calls but limit the outgoing call time to maximum of 5 minutes for example.

Any thoughts ?

Thx.
Z

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So I am contributing a lot minutes to the community pool.

Indeed, thank you.

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My credit stands on 10 all the time and I wonder if there has been any thoughts around how to make some "slightly" more expensive calls available to users like myself ?

There's been a lot of discussion on this, and, yes, the short answer is we'd like to gear the system to work in that way.

What we have discussed is to have 2 or 3 "groups" and move users from group to group. Each group has a different access "type" - users in the top group could perhaps call mobiles or have longer call times etc - generally a little more relaxed on the current ruleset. Jumping from group to group would be based on Account Rating and possibly other factors.

It sounds simple, but from a technical perspective, it's actually quite tricky to do due to the way that the system was designed when we first built it.

Bear in mind that back in 2003 not many people had even heard of "VoIP" or realised that a lot of these things were possible. As a result we never anticipated we'd have more than a few hundred users experimenting (we presumed) with Asterisk and SIP based systems. In fact, VoIP User was originally created as a "playground" for people wanting to experiment without having to give out credit card details or pay anything. We certainly didn't anticipate that there would be (as at today) nearly 23,000 subscribers and a growth rate of about 70 new members per day.

Because of that growth, we had to fix a few things and make a few more up as we went, and our backend system was never designed to scale in a way to make these kind of fundamental changes easy (20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing!).

That's the main reason why it hasn't happened yet.

Essentially, we'd like to do it, but it will require a large amount of man-hours in programming to make it happen. We have to redesign everything and basically rebuild it from scratch.

It's about 10% done..... and it's impossible to really give an accurate ETA on when to expect these kind of changes.

But it will almost certainly happen eventually.

Dean