Many fan sites are located on free hosting services, such as Tripod and Geocities. Those services don't charge their customers but they do put restrictive access limits on their pages, along with (frequently) annoying banner and pop-up ads. We made the decision in Fall 2001 to pay for our own webspace so that we wouldn't have to deal with those restrictions and intrusions. We also took our message-board in-house at the same time. Many sites use the EZboard message board community but paying for its ads to be removed can become very expensive if your board receives a lot of traffic, and, according to its terms of service, virtually everything is forbidden. Given the large amount of erotic fiction on our site -- and which we are well known for -- we prefer to be in a position where we have more control over our pages than those "free" services would have given us. Paying services do add up in terms of cost, however, and the administrators of AoVD are hardly wealthy.
 

These vary. At the moment we pay approximately $135 per year for our webspace and another $20 per year for our domain name. Occasionally we need to buy an additional software product or service to enhance our site, as well.
 

Excess funds will be used to grow the site or purchase upgrades to existing modules and programs. This could include things like new chat room applets, proprietary message board features that have to be paid for, more storage space on our server, and a higher bandwidth allottment. We may also pre-pay bills for the coming year with such funds, or purchase items that can be used as prizes for contests. We also save money for emergency situations. (For example, very recently we had to conduct an emergency transfer and repair of our site's content after our old webhoster's server was attacked and destroyed by a virus.)
 

Absolutely not. None of our content is being ransomed here. Membership on our message board and access to our chat room is free (although you must be eighteen or older to sign in, due to the mature content), as is access to all of our pages.
 

Pretty much, you get our gratitude and hopefully a sense that you have helped our community to flourish. At this point we don't have anything we can sell, outright, ourselves. If we did, that would create a whole new tax paperwork nightmare for us, anyway.
 

<<<Our Paypal link is currently offline but should be back soon.>>>
 

We have refunded gifts before and can do so again, and very likely will if you ask. However, please keep in mind before you make the gift that you are not buying anything by doing so. Giving us money will not entitle you to rank, power or prestige on our site, nor will it give you policy-making rights. If you make a gift, you should be doing so because you like the site as it is and want to see it continue to flourish and grow, not because you're trying to buy a "seat on the board" or purchase favor with the site administrators. People who have tried to do that in the past have had their money refunded to them as soon as we realized that was the case. However, if you decide a year after your gift that you no longer like the site and want your money back, that is a bit too long after the fact for us to honor your request.
 

Yes. You can shop with us. Purchases made through our shopping pages will earn the site commissions on the products you buy. These commissions range from 2% to 20% depending on the merchant and the item.

Even if you already own all of the products on our pages, if you still shop with any of our online merchants, you can continue to help us by having every purchase you make with them credited to us. Copy the following text into your bookmarks for each of these merchants, and all of your purchases with them will earn the Art of Vin Diesel commissions:

Using these links will not change the price of the goods you purchase from these merchants. We simply receive credit for your purchases and earn referral commissions for the sales, rather as if we were the clerks who rang up your purchases in a store.

If you have a favorite online merchant that you like to shop with, who isn't listed here, contact us. We will check and see if they have an affiliate/associate program. If they do, we can arrange to join it and send you a URL (like the ones above) to put in your bookmarks. Then the purchases you make most often will help our site grow.
 

We're quite sure. Frankly, there's no profit to be made. The cost of building and maintaining the site, in terms of labor and time, is enormous and uncompensated. Our webmistress, alone, puts in the equivalent of an unpaid full-time job on the site; it would take a lot of gifts and commissions to pay her for her time if we had to, and she's hardly the only one working on the site. We don't do it for money but out of our love for the work, for the community, and out of our love and respect for Vin Diesel. This is also why certain items such as tell-all books, although possibly available through the merchants above, will never appear on our pages. We're trying to make this the best fan site it can possibly be, and one that shows Vin our respect for him.
 

We hope this has answered your questions. Should you still have any, please contact us with them and we'll be happy to assist you.