OPEN  LETTER  TO  THE  COMMUNITY

WHY WE HAVE TO DO THIS ... Dear Developer! Please take some minutes to read these lines because it is important to us that you understand our situation and see why we couldn’t maintain delphi3000.com as a free service. We are proud that the launch of delphi3000.com was very successful. With a lot of enthusiasm and night-sessions ;-) we did launch this web-service and Borland did list delphi3000.com among the “Sites of Interest” and the “Delphi resource links”. After three months delphi3000.com reached 2000 subscribed members; after one year this number did increase to 20.000! About.com did recognize delphi3000.com as one of the best actual delphi services – Best of the Net award – June 2000. delphi3000.com quickly reached 30% of 3000 articles… the declared aim of the platform. This user-acceptance did show us that our approach of a database-driven (costly) website with a high degree of interactivity is the right one. All this made us very optimistic that delphi3000.com will work and we can provide the platform as a free service for Delphi developers world wide ... Our strategy was to finance all our expenses for delphi3000 with advertising and sponsorship incomes. In 1999 and 2000 (before the NASDAQ-crash) this was very realistic! Unfortunately the picture that we are earning good money with delphi3000.com is not the case (as with the most internet start-ups in these days). We are not reaching a point where our incomes “pay” our costs for the webserver-machine and software licenses (not to mention our investments for the launch of the project). At the same time the demands for the web-server and the database are rising and rising (at this moment we have between 6000 and 8000 unique visitors per day which means to serve more than 60.000 page-views a day) !! Unfortunately we could not reach a convenient agreement with our provider for these gigabytes of transfer per month that is caused by the exploding traffic. Because of that and to keep the usability of delphi3000.com we had to upgrade the server several times (we are sure many of you will remember this… inconveniences did occur and we are very unhappy about situations like this !). The costs for the server made it clear that this calculation can’t work ! We payed (and are paying!!) several thousand dollars so far to keep delphi3000.com alive and can’t effort this any longer. One word concerning the technology: with the knowledge of today it’s easy to say that it would have been better to use open-source (and therefore free) tools – however… bluestep.com has huge knowledge on IIS-webserver infrastructure and could therefore implement the system in acceptable time (and price). However, we are at the point where we have only one chance to keep delphi3000.com running … and this is with YOUR support ! We know that this won’t be welcomed by the community ! However – to make memberships more attractive we did develop a new tool to view and search the whole delphi3000.com database offline – with the look & feel of our delphi3000.com user-interface ! We had many requests on such an offline-reader and we hope that this attracts you. At the same time it will probably lower our online-traffic and therefore make life easier for us. We are happy to release CodeFinder Version 1.0 (CodeFinder Description) – a small & compact application to view and search the whole delphi3000 database offline ! You can download CodeFinder with the meta-database (db without article answers) for free in order to test it and have a quick access to all titles of delphi3000.com. Full access to all articles answers is available for SILVER- or GOLD-memberships. Have a look at our CodeFinder Description ! We hope you will stay faithful and will continue to work with delphi3000.com ! BRONZE-membership allows you to read new articles (TripleDay-Freebies: You have free access to articles uploaded on the day of your visit or 1,2 days before) whereas SILVER- or GOLD-membership gives you full access. Have a look at our membership-system ! Become a SILVER- or GOLD-member to keep delphi3000.com running ! Your delphi3000.com team