Hello -
I am the owner of Airsoft Hub, and I thought i'd address a few of the comments made here - as well as any additional ones you may have.
I founded Airsoft Hub back in 2017 and since then i've ran the website single handed at a loss. The website contains no adverts, I don't charge for listings or featured adverts etc. so I've been operating the website at a loss for 7, nearly 8 years. I have to pay for the server, image hosting, sending emails (when they work :D), SMS's for mobile verification etc. and there is tens of thousands of users on the platform.
Apologies if you do ever drop me a message and I don't reply, I don't even go Airsofting anymore, and haven't for probably 4-5 years so the website (unfortunately) isn't a priority for me and with the amount of users on the platform, it's impossible to keep up!
I have toyed with the idea of rebuilding it from the ground up in the last year, but i'm struggling to find the motivation to do so (it's a big time investment to not gain anything from it!). I believe when I made it 7 years ago, it was the best around, I don't know what the competition is like these days as as I mentioned previously, Airsoft isn't a hobby of mine anymore.
The notifications were broken and I apologise for that, unfortunately the server ran out of disk space a while back and killed off a background task as a result which went unnoticed for some time. But as of this evening should be resolved.
As for the future of Airsoft Hub, I can see 3 possible outcomes:
1) I leave it as is, and let it run into the ground - although it is still very active looking at the analytics
2) I rebuild it, but as part of that, i'll likely introduce payments of some sort (I was looking to use a 3rd party initially to do ID verification to remove scammers and make it the most secure platform. However, this comes at a cost). Essentially though, if i'm going to actively maintain it, it needs to be worth my time.
3) I just kill it off and save myself some money each month.
I'd be open to opinions from the community on what they'd be interested in - and if there is any quick wins which will drastically improve the experience on the website, please let me know. For example, based on a message this evening, I added the age of the advert to the listing.
Regards,
Dave
Airsoft Hub.
