Site Related Forum | plane-mad.com into the future (part 2)

It comes as no surprise that an increasing number of people are asking who is now responsible for running Plane-Mad.com, given that Dan is no longer with us.

To cut a long story short, I think it is fair to say, that, with the blessing of Simon Hill and the rest of his immediate family, I have effectively inherited ownership of the P-M website. That said, I never for one moment envisaged 'taking charge' of P-M. To put it bluntly, I am doing what I'm doing purely and simply because I think it's a brilliant website and because I'd hate to see all of Dan's hard work go to waste.

So far as I'm concerned, now that ownership of the hosting account and domain name have been transferred to me, my job is done. Indeed, I cannot help thinking that the mods/screeners are the people best qualified to 'micro-manage' P-M on a day-to-day basis. Hence, the reason why I would prefer that we establish some sort of 'mini co-operative' (I hesitate to use the term 'committee'), i.e. rather than having one person (me) running the show. That way, we (hopefully) ensure that the site is run on a democratic basis, whilst also avoiding a repeat of the current situation whereby 'the boss' unexpectedly shuffles off this mortal coil and those who are left behind have to pick up the pieces. That's not in any way meant to be a criticism of Dan, but I think you will agree that it would be to everyone's advantage if we came up with a solution that avoided us having to jump through so many hoops next time round.

Going forward, I am also minded to set up a bank account in the name of P-M, i.e. as opposed to one individual being solely responsible for all things financial. To facilitate this, P-M will need to be converted into an 'unincorporated association', the name of which can then be registered with the Registrar of Business Names, thereby also allowing us to apply for charitable status. Provided our application is successful, we will not have to pay tax on any income which may be generated from Dan's GoogleAdsense account, the proceeds of which are used to underwrite the cost of hosting the site on AWS. The procedure to be followed in setting up an 'unincorporated association' is not particularly complex and, in my humble opinion, going down this route could potentially save us a lot of grief in the future.

Well, that's about it for now, but, before I sign off, can I just say that none of the above is cast in stone and, if anyone reading this has any alternative suggestions as to how P-M should be managed in the future, then I would be very pleased to hear from them.

Cheers.

James Pye

Thanks groobs, much appreciated. If only we knew where to find Dan's SSH Key, the rest of it would be plain sailing!