Building a Community

[ete]

Donation accepting is not necessarily all that messy, using GitTip (which is a weekly tip service) gets around the issues with paypal or credit cards and the monthly being better than one time thing. Would make it much easier for more than just BU/sisko to fund the site. Take a look around their site: https://www.gittip.com/

[Vishniac]

Ads on forums suck, but I can get them to not use the political ads on us, and nobody cares about the rest - you stop noticing, quick.

I'd rather have the political ones and not the commercial ones.

[DrazharLn]

If the download section is using a lot of bandwidth you could reduce your costs by hosting it elsewhere. I can provide fast and free static file hosting quite easily for non-commercial content. (I currently host about 9 GBs of content for an ARMA group and must have used hundreds of GBs of bandwidth).

There might be a possibility of hosting the whole forum for a moderate sum with the same people but I'd have to ask a bit and the forum would have to be strictly non-commercial (no ads at all). If you want me to look into that, let me know, but bear in mind it might not be possible.

If you let me know what your current costs and requirements are I can have a look around commercial hosts too (I have plenty of friends who do this professionally, so there's a possibility of finding somewhere cheaper).

[Buster's Uncle]

Nothing personal, but I have zero interest in any server host who tries to tell us what we can and cannot do.  I'll give sisko a heads-up, though.

[DrazharLn]

I'm part of a computing society that provides free hosting for individuals and low cost hosting for societies and maybe a couple of other non-commercial entities. The resources of the computing society are colocated in the University, and it would be a bit inappropriate to use their utilities (power and network) for free if we were hosting commercial entities.

It's an offer. Hosting the downloads would be trivial and I can do that on my personal account. Hosting the forum would be a bigger thing that we might not be able to do, but that might be good for the forum because it would be cheap for the quality.

[Buster's Uncle]

I hope sisko will think over the Downloads part - what we need there is capacity and reliability w/ good site integration/backlinking/AC2 branding.  I don't recall ads ever displaying in there when we tried them previously, so that part shouldn't be a problem.

The forum as a whole, though, we'd like to stop spending our own personal money to maintain.  I don't mind spending a good deal of my waking life running this place, but backing it with money, too, is a bit much.

[DrazharLn]

I understand.

A low cost, no advertising solution might be what you want if the existing costs less the advertising revenue are still less than the hosting from my folk. If AC grew large enough that that equation looked to be tipping the other way it would be simple enough to move back to a commercial host and set up adverts.

I don't particularly want to encourage you to use the Computing Society anyway, just throwing it out there because you were complaining about the existing performance and cost.

As I said, let me know your deets if you want me to check with the hosts I know about, or not if you've got it sorted. Just trying to give you some options; I don't want you and sisko to be paying out of pocket for this place either.

If you did want me to mirror or host the downloads section, branding wouldn't be a particular issue. OTOH, there's no' much point moving the downloads somewhere else unless they're costing you significant bandwidth or something.

[ete]

Combining DrazharLn's offer with a GitTip account may work pretty well to achieve what BU wants in the short term, if we can get a small handful of people putting like 30 cents a week in. This place is not exactly resource intensive, it's a smallish forum and a small text based low activity wiki, plus some static downloads. Requiring non-commercial is fine so long as it's cool that we accept donations to cover hosting/domain costs.

If sisko's okay with it I'd encourage the basic specs needed to run AC2 be posted publicly, along with what you're currently paying. There's no real reason to have it hidden and having it in the open would help people to help.

[Buster's Uncle]

This idea does not thrill me - I already said what I think about accepting donations.

[ete]

Your objection was that one off donations are not sustainable (and secondarily that it adds complication), which is specifically and entirely solved by the site I suggest.

Take a look: https://www.gittip.com/

[Buster's Uncle]

Too late to think.  Brain hurts.  Bed.

[ete]

Sleep is important!

[Geo]

Especially a reliable cryogenic or stasis version if you want to go interstellar!

[Buster's Uncle]

Okay, here's the thing, since a diplomatic and true answer wasn't good enough, I'm forced to put my foot down.  I had a traumatic experience with a forum that took donations, and turned out to have justice for sale.  Even though I'm on the other end of it and that won't happen here, we'll take donations over my. dead. body.  It may not be rational, but I don't care.  Not going to happen here, no matter the safeguards/anonymity/dependability of money, and I'd rather not hear about it again.

Besides, I cannot imagine how the dependability could possibly be fixed.  Not.  Interested.  -Period.

[Geo]

In other words, we're going to see ads on the forum? Just asking, not complaining.