At the beginning of this month, users of popular email based classifieds service, Dipleague, asked about a sudden stop to the flow of the service’s emails. According to questions posted here on Techzim, the service had stopped delivering emails to member mailboxes around the 23rd of April. Today, founder and moderator of the service, Samir Shasha, explained that the service was down due to a server failure.
Here’s part of the email sent to Dipleague members:
I’m sure you noticed that your dipleague emails were not flowing and in some cases your posts did not appear. The dipleague server basically fell over since the end of April and came back up a few days ago. I held back notifying you so my message would not add to the chaos. Please accept my apologies and thank to all who alerted me to this problem.
Shasha also explained that with almost 26,000 members, the service had become resource heavy as each email sent by a member is broadcast to all members. “The system has become very fragile and we will upgrade it shortly,” said Shasha. He went on to allude to the fact that Dipleague doesn’t provide them any revenue, but that they’d strive to keep the service going anyway: “- a free service without advertisement revenue struggles but we will come through and keep this extraordinary service going.”
Shasha also said the service might get some smartphone apps in the future.
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8 comments
Maybe they could consider a donations drive – maybe do it annually like Wikipedia has done all these years. A lot of people have benefited greatly form the service, and I’m sure would willingly help out to ensure its continued success. I would happily send them a few bucks via ecocash to help with the bills. The key is to not get carried away and have the thing end up being a business – (which is a MAJOR DANGER if Econet decides to get too involved). But I think a simple VOLUNTARY donation drive, for one month each year to help with server upgrades and maintenance can’t hurt.
It does need better moderation for a start. It’s almost spammy right now with the obvious not meeting/breaking of posting guidelines that’s going on
I can’t believe it took a couple of weeks to realise it fell over though. I mean I get an SMS within 10 minutes of any of my servers going offline. Even the one that earns me no revenues but simply exists for community benefit (Linux mirror)
and in no time someone started a similar list zimbiz@zimbusiness.co.zw, and in no time the zimbiz was getting spammed and delayed emails only to send almost 20 digests last nyt. aaah free things
Personally i think its time we move away from this “culture” of free online services in Zimbabwe. Its contributing heavily to poor products and services. People must learn and accept that, to get a quality service up and running, it costs money and that money has to be recovered from someone. Simple. Zvemahara izvi hazvina future.
Some food for thought.
1. Imagine the quality of news, reviews and articles we would get if Techzim was a $12/year service.
2. Imagine the crappy service classifieds.co.zw would be if it was 100% Free.
3. What would life be if EcoCash was free….it would have died a natural death some months ago.
4. Imagine life with weddev offering all their services for free?
Lets move on with life guys and bury this “free service” culture with 2012. Hello?
free is not really all that bad, especially when you are trying to get the thing adopted
maybe what they really need is a way to make $ out of it. But i think what pushes the volumes up is that its free.
because the trend we see on the web is that free co-exists with paid, so i strongly think that these guys should focus on monitising the service, come up with a proper plan and look for an investor, with over 26,000 subscibers one sees the potential there . .
That’s what I am talking about. There are a lot of models you can implement to get some funds coming. Facebook is “free” we all know that, but its really not free! someone is paying the billions! Another example is Yahoo, free basic email but if you want real service you pay up and get Yahoo Mail Plus.
1. There is a place for “Free”, ad-supported (or otherwise) services. GMail is free and I would choose it over the best Yahoo Mail money can buy
2. Payments are not a solved problem. It’s hard to simplify payments for ephemeral stuff like DipLeague. Would you take 10 minutes to pay for something you’d take 2 minutes to skim through? I wouldn’t
3. Paying for a TechZim subscription might make sense for regular readers; how about once-off visitors – 50 cents an article? Won’t be worth the hassle. Don’t underestimate the long tail.
4. Counter-example: Linux. End-users don’t pay for it, but somehow, it managed to become the best, and only gets better with time. Or maybe you prefer Windows? 😉
I agree with this sentiment, they should try find a balance where eg an advertiser gets 5 free postings a month anything after that is paid for, similar to classifieds and its free postings vs buying a storefront.
Means the small guy on the street can still use the service, but the people running it are still making a living.
One cannot do it from the goodness of their heart forever, eventually their needs to be some other motivation or to find someone else to donate their time when you are too busy / have new priorities.