The Future of Our Community and Its Funding

[rubber_jonnie]

Yep donate button is here too:

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But as with anything it is dependent on people seeing and using it...

Patreon is used a lot by You Tubers and their Patrons often get additional content, something I'm not sure you could do here, at least not easily.

I just donated BTW

[stephen_usher]

Of course, Patreon has the benefit of fire and forget monthly/annual donations and also takes care of all the messy charging thing so people can use their preferred Internet payment method, which is often Paypal. The down side is that Patreon takes a cut.

As long as it's made clear what Patrons get for their money I don't think that it matters what that it, even if it's a fuzzy glow that they've helped keep the services running.

Here's an idea for a Patron perk... build a novelty flashing LED badge for the top tier... Should be able to get your favourite Chinese PCB fab to make one, after all they generally make them for themselves as freebies.

Tier 1: £2/month: Fuzzy feeling. You get a slight fuzzy feeling about supporting the forum.
Tier 2: £4/month: Some tingling. In addition to the slight fuzzy feeling you get tingles from your generosity.
Tier 3: £8/month: A warm glow. You get a warm glow of satisfaction from supporting the forum.
Tier 4: £16/month: Gratitude and a badge: You get the sincere gratitude of Exxos and the forum members and a free badge with sparkly LEDs at the time you sign up.

How does that sound.

P.S. You could add a post with the current Patreons on the front page as a thanks.

[exxos]

To give people an idea what the monthly cost is just for the raw server and disk backups each month..

This does not include cleantalk (spam protection) , domain prices, GPT subscription and maybe other costs I have forgotten about right now.
None of this includes the huge volume of hourly backups which are currently provided by one of our members for free (thanks!) .

~£37, or £444 per year.

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I even had three additional premium servers running for a few months while processing all the spam on the wiki. Which was certainly not cheap. I do have to employee secondary servers while doing dry run updates to the forum or server software as well. Running such servers is certainly not a cheap endeavour! Let alone all the time I spent maintaining all this stuff!

We are running a pretty quick server, even with just 4 cores. 4 cores is more than plenty for most traffic other than when we start getting hit with spam or various attacks / bots etc. One reason I'm trying to limit the attacks because they are just maxing out the CPU.. I could just keep throwing more CPU cores at the problem, but then costs substantially increase again and I don't really see that as a good solution anyway. The server still runs a bit slow for about five minutes while the SQL database is dumped among other things.

I also must stress there is another upcoming issue, where while I have a lot more disk space "available", when the server package was upgraded last time, the disk did not resize to the larger capacity (I have not yet reported the issue to the host deliberately ). I've been frantically trying to keep the disc space down lately, because when the disk is resized to the larger capacity, the "image" backups will double in size and cost also. So another £242 per year. Realistically the bottom line will be around £800 a year in the near future.

So for those who are querying how much things actually cost to run per year, then this gives people an idea on how much funding we actually need each year to even break even.

Thanks to everyone who has made a donation so far it is much appreciated!

[chronicthehedgehog]

I normally have about £50 free Azure credit left over every month if you need to spin up a temp server or something.

Doesn't go very far when you spin up big iron on Azure though

[stween]

So for those who are querying how much things actually cost to run per year, then this gives people an idea on how much funding we actually need each year to even break even.

This is useful info. I'd wager there'd be value in a 'state of the union' sticky post -- not a discussion thread, where details will get buried -- where you outline costs like these and rough income from donations. Post into the thread roughly annually with updated numbers.

[rubber_jonnie]

So for those who are querying how much things actually cost to run per year, then this gives people an idea on how much funding we actually need each year to even break even.

This is useful info. I'd wager there'd be value in a 'state of the union' sticky post -- not a discussion thread, where details will get buried -- where you outline costs like these and rough income from donations. Post into the thread roughly annually with updated numbers.

I like that idea

[alexh]

I would be happy to regularly contribute but if there was the opportunity to host privately I have access to a tremendous amount of DELL server rackmount equipment circa 2018 that is currently just going into the WEE. Not good enough for microchip development anymore but certainly more than enough for a heavy load web server.

[exxos]

I would be happy to regularly contribute but if there was the opportunity to host privately I have access to a tremendous amount of DELL server rackmount equipment circa 2018 that is currently just going into the WEE. Not good enough for microchip development anymore but certainly more than enough for a heavy load web server.

Thanks for the offer I'll keep it in mind..

Ironically that was the type of "system" I originally intended to use back in day one when I built a "mini PC" to host everything on. It pretty much only had the power of a laptop but was certainly good enough to run the server at the time. The problem there was, aside from maintenance and possible failures (costs to fix) the bottom line was the costs of electricity it would use, it would far exceed what a "external" server would cost to run per year. So I quickly abandoned that idea. Considering electricity is now considerable more as the years have gone on.. And also considering we probably need a lot more CPU power these days.. I don't remember the particulars but I know I wrote about it all years ago..

[exxos]

This is useful info. I'd wager there'd be value in a 'state of the union' sticky post -- not a discussion thread, where details will get buried -- where you outline costs like these and rough income from donations. Post into the thread roughly annually with updated numbers.

Not sure about the forum, but it could probably be scripted on the donation page on the wiki as I have set up scripts to deal with all that already. I actually edited that script last night so the wiki donation contents get updated faster (now pretty much real-time).

Indeed I will calculate what the actual running costs are per year versus what donations are per year and output it on the page for now.

I was thinking about doing a monthly "chart" to show the donations per running costs, but this may not look completely correct, because like for this month we have had some donations which means we could have 5x the donations per running costs this month... But subsequent months may not get any donations, people may get the impression we are overfunded when the yearly cost still hasn't been met..

It is further complicated because some people will donate a fixed amount per year or do a subscription.. So the donations per month would actually vary. So I think doing a yearly target is probably the way to go. Though I can only calculate on the current donations even though there are subscriptions, I cannot predict how often they will happen or what the total would be at the end of the year until it actually happens.. I will have to think about this a little bit more when I get more time..

In terms of "reward badges" , I could bring back the "ranks" back and people can have a "gold sponsor badge" show up in their info box to show they are sponsoring the forum...? In order for this to work people would have to put their forum name in the "who to credit name box" when doing the donations for it work.

I *should* be able to script this with some database hackery. Again this is a bit complicated because of single donations or regular contributions. It would have to be set at something like £1 a week, so people who are making regular contributions by subscription would pretty much get the sponsor badge all the time.. And then people who donate like .£10 one off, still get the badge, and they get it for 10 weeks.

Mostly just thinking out loud, though I do think people should get some sort of "reward badge" visible on the forum, it would give people a bit of "bling" which show their sponsorship.

[Darklord]

AtariAge does something like that. I have a "Subscriber" label underneath my
forum name and avatar there...