Sturgeon's Thank You Thread - Please Donate To Keep Us Going

[Sturgeon]

A big hearty thank-you to @Bohemond for his donation! You stand in the ranks of heroes, sir!

[Collimatrix]

On 8/25/2018 at 1:01 PM, LoooSeR said:

Seriously, i am one of reason of increased costs?

 

 

Sorry, I forgot about this question.

 

Our hosting costs are a function of two factors; disc space use, and total active user slots.

Our disc space use is nothing because I currently have local file storage disabled.  Aside from our emoticon library, this entire forum is basically all HTML files, which is basically text.  All the pictures and videos you see on this forum are hosted somewhere else, so our disc space use is about 10% of the limit before we need to upgrade the service.  So spam post away; it costs basically nothing.

 

Our total active user slots average about 30% of capacity, but there are spikes about once a day that go up to 70% capacity or so.  For very, very brief times, maybe twice every week, we will max out capacity, but I think these "users" are search engine spiders and not actual users.

[Sturgeon]

Big whopping thank-you to @Xoon, who donated to keep the forum going! I am in awe of your chiseled visage, friend!

[Toxn]

On 8/25/2018 at 5:09 PM, Collimatrix said:

 

Our hosting costs would go down, but we would also loose our funding from Putin.

So what your saying is that we'd all become looosers?

[Collimatrix]

1 hour ago, Toxn said:

So what your saying is that we'd all become looosers?

 

 

Yes, yes, well done.

[Collimatrix]

A big thank you to @Bronezhilet, @Tekky and @LostCosmonaut for donating their Discord nitro boosts.  I'm not sure what I think of Discord's current monetization scheme, but we'll give the higher bitrate a try.

[Sturgeon]

A big damn thank you to @Miroslav for his donation! You stand shoulder-to-shoulder with giants, my friend!

Also, as you may have seen we now have a Patreon set up for the forum. The purpose of the Patreon is only to fund the website and not to make the administrators any money.

So far, the way funding the website has worked has been thus: Users donate money to me directly. I pay for the website. When this website was small, this worked really well as the hosting costs were small and the amount of donations were typically lower than the costs. Every now and again I'd get a big donation that covered several months, but accounting was simple.

Now, however, things are different. The website is much larger, and hosting costs have gone up about an order of magnitude. This is a little too much for me to comfortably eat every month, and besides that we're getting enough donations, especially with the Patreon, that our members deserve a little more accountability. So, I will be endeavoring to make a separate financial account for SH into which donations and the Patreon money will be deposited, and from which the hosting costs will be paid. It should be as simple as that. One of my goals moving forward will be to keep the Patreon updated so that people understand the real costs of running the website and do not feel the need to donate in excess of those costs, if they so choose. I will probably make it clear in terms of "SH is fully funded + 2 months" or "SH is 66% funded + 1 month", which would mean perpetual (i.e., Patreon) funds cover 66% of the month-to-month hosting costs and we have 1 month's worth in the bank. Hopefully that's as transparent as it needs to be.

Obviously, if you just want to throw money my way for being such a coolguy admin then fine. But keeping the forum running should be a separate and more accountable affair. 

[Sturgeon]

Big thank you to @Gripen287 for his donation!