The Future of Our Community and Its Funding

[exxos]

This has taken me all day to do :roll: Mostly because mediawiki wouldn't let me edit common.css.. then another page I had css in didn't work. So started over with a clean css file and then MW decides to change my page code by adding <pre> tags which totally screwed up the formatting of the page ?! Just WHY does it need to change stuff on its own... :pullhair: :headbang:

Anyway...

https://www.atari-wiki.com/index.php?ti ... iki:Donate

This is now displayed at the bottom of the page...

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It is scripted and will update automatically on donations (hopefully!) The cost per year for the calculation hasn't yet been accurately worked out, but its not going to be far off as its set now I think anyway.

I may have to do something about the user list for donations because the list will get extremely long with subscriptions every month.. :shrug:
the only idea is to list uses once and then have a field next to their name just simply quoting how many times they made a donation and when the last donation was...

EDIT:
Updated user list to correlate names. This will only work properly people use the same name and really should use their forum name in future..

EDIT2:
I will have to contact Stripe about the subscriptions because while payments will likely go through, I'm not sure about the "name to credit" will be passed automatically... If that's the case, I am not sure it's going to be possible to keep tabs on subscription payments :(

EDIT3:
The 2024 current expenditure has now been properly calculated :shock: it was higher than I thought at £707. :shock: the only real option currently to reduce costs is to reduce the full disk backups to once a month instead of once a week.. Not really good with the amount of updates which happen each week. There are daily backups copied over to a offsite server, but those are just the basics like SQL and HTML folders, they don't include the full system backups. But I guess if we struggle to hit the target, I may have to reduce costs and go down that road.

[supaduper]

Just donated using your Stripe link so check it has gone though fella

supaduper

[exxos]

Just donated using your Stripe link so check it has gone though fella

Just noticed the payment, that is extremely generous of you! :cheers: :thanksyellow:

[ftovar]

I am new here. How many users do you have and will an annual subscription help? Crunch the numbers. I am also on Atari-Forum.com and Atari Age. Other than Atari Age being bought by Atari how did Albert and Atari-Forum get by? Reach out to them as well. Just my two cents. Thank you

[exxos]

I am new here. How many users do you have and will an annual subscription help? Crunch the numbers. I am also on Atari-Forum.com and Atari Age. Other than Atari Age being bought by Atari how did Albert and Atari-Forum get by? Reach out to them as well. Just my two cents. Thank you

From what I remember from several years ago, AF had that much donations they was considering giveaways. It may not be the case these days. But I never got the impression they had that many people making donations.

We would basically need like 20 people on subscription donating £3 a month to break even on current expenditure. LTT even said it's a tough time for forums right now when he was talking about ananadtech shutting down. The amount of "admin" running the server these days is crazy. It's a full time job, which I'm doing for free I might add. Every week a new server attacks appears . While a LOT is taken care of with firewall rules, you can never catch them all. It's become a huge timesink.

Atariage was/is ? A large forum as it had a lot of 8bit going on. The 16bit side is pretty much a waste land. But with it's userbase being large, I'm guessing they have enough donations to make it work. Before Atari took over that is.

I'd be surprised if we hit our target running costs for the year. But it's not just this year.. it's every year...If the targets can't be met, then I'll have to start reducing costs where the weekly full disk backups will have to go. Not a problem until the disk dies. I've said it all before anyway.

[stephen_usher]

Having a continuous subscriptions are key though for long-term funding. The "Donate" button doesn't facilitate this as it requires an active payment every month rather than an auto-payment where people don't have to remember. This is why services such as Patreon work, people just become a subscriber and they can let that service do all the heavy lifting, for a price.

I'm sure that many people here would pay £5 a month (for which the forum would probably get £3) via such a service.

[mrbombermillzy]

I seem to be ultra busy and dont really have time to read much here nowadays, but I did notice this thread and was looking to implement the below at some point anyway, so here goes...

Ok, so in the background, a few of us have been discussing moving forwards with the Cyberlegends event.

This has resulted in a funding account purely for the Cyberlegends event which will mean that all event ticket sales are now transferred directly to this account and will help fund future Cyberlegend events (which means venue hire, prize purchasing, logo printing and even merchandise at some point).

However, I am committed to supporting this forum, as the senior members here have generously supported me with the planning and financial aspects of Cyberlegends over the years.

That, along with the top notch comradery and generosity on this forum, are rarely found elsewhere on the internet, so I would like to nurture and protect that in any way I can.

With all the above taken into consideration, I am therefore happy to donate 50% of all profits from the Cyberlegends events towards the Exxosforum upkeep.

Providing we all try our best to make Cyberlegends a successful event each year and spread the word to expand attendance, I think we can crack these costs (detailed above by Exxos) to a fair extent.

Anyway, 'HTH' as they say. :D

P.S. Get your Cyberlegends 2024 tickets here: ;) viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7215

[exxos]

That would be great but please don't do that if your not even getting the halls costs back etc.

Thanks to everyone who's donated so far. Once the target is reached I will post the server receipt as proof the funds were used for the server running costs.

I should have the sponsor badge system running in a few days. But I've gotta redo how the database works yet as it needs to keep track of who paid what amount better. It's slow going as I can only spend about a hour or 2 on the pc these days :(

I got a reply from stripe about subscriptions triggering the name field on each payment, it sounds like it does but it's not clear what's going to actually happen until next month when the next payment is taken.

[troed]

Cloud hosting is _never_ cheaper than doing it yourself. I run a home server with various services on a four core i5 and 32GB RAM - way more than would be needed for this forum and database server as an example. My main job is cybersecurity with a hefty dose of devops so the configuration is "good".

That server runs on 150W or so (UPS numbers), which means my electricity costs are somewhere around 10-15 EUR/month. That includes the many-TB RAID which keeps backups for all of the services. I do believe UK electricity is more expensive than south of Sweden, although ours is still much more expensive than north of Sweden.

I don't believe correctly configured fail2ban and forum signup code should need costly anti-spam services. I don't know how well my pfSense router would handle an actual DDoS but I don't think that's a threat that needs special consideration.

Now, please don't misunderstand - I think it's _great_ if the community can handle the costs through donations - but the funds are limited and if we make sure to reduce costs then the same money can be used for other things in the community than just paying off commercial companies.

(Also, sad to hear sales are down Chris, but Brexit meant a lot higher costs when buying from the UK for I guess most of us ...)

/Troed

[exxos]

I think you have missed a lot of what's been going on and how many attacks have been ongoing over the past few months. I've posted lots of info about it like the wiki being hit 40,000 times with various account hacking attacks. I've updated fail2ban and now it's correctly dealing with those attacks.. it's not going to deal with next week's new attack vector though.. I keep thinking there won't be anymore. .but I keep getting surprised on how another attack vector manages to turn up... Its been a fulltime job for the past several weeks! not easy when my hands are in agony either and I need to keep away from the PC for the next several weeks.. but it keeps dragging me back!!

As it's been soaking up all my time , 3rd party tools have to be brought in to help deal with all the attacks. I'm losing the battle on my own. This is NOT a trivial problem.. There are so many attacks and different ones happening weekly. Patching them takes times. Fail2ban can only deal with known attacks. The log of what it's dealing with are huge! I've posted all sorts about it all. But I'm just repeating myself again now.

You either have to throw time or money at problems.. I can't keep dealing with all this on my own, so costs going up is the only way unfortunately. The anti-spam services don't cost that much. Its the cloud backup for the full disk which takes up costs. I can't really do anything about that. hourly Backups are done to a offsite server which a member is letting me use. So huge costs have already been reduced there already. I cannot use RSYNC to backup the disk as the server has to go offline to copy the disk. So I am limited to the hosts cloud service for full disk backups. Other than reducing the number of backups I don't really see any alternatives currently.

Self hosting has a whole bunch of issues and I quickly worked out years back it would be more expensive long term.. but I'm not going down that road again after all this time. I have a limited internet package and speed for starters.. things are never simple when you get into all the details. Even if someone offered a "free" server to me... is that person going to be on call 24/7 to offer support? Are they going to deal with the problems within a couple of hours ? Are they going to fix hardware failures within a few hours ? Are they going to do it indefinitely for the rest of their lives? I think it's rather a large gamble to rely on the person hosting such things.

I mean the raw server costs like $22 a month for a VPS 4GB RAM 4 Cores 100GB SSD. Is not really that bad in the grand scheme of things! But also the host (Ramnode) have gone above and beyond to offer me good support which is always extremely important to me to get things done quickly and efficiently. So I would be super reluctant to change from them after all these years. At one point in the very early days I was using a friends server, FOC, one of his staff banned my package (can't remember why) so its at that point I decided going with a proper paid for package with a commercial company and not have my server killed out of the blue. It was just the way to go... There have been many battles fought over the years to end up how things are now..

EDIT:

F2B log for the past 20 hours..

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3,113 matches and 368 banned. May not sound like much, but each of those IPs is hitting various pages with various attacks multiple times. Its how we end up with multiple IP's doing various attacks per second which then ends up causing the server to run slowly and chuck out 502 errors like it did a couple days ago. Those attacks maxed out all 4 CPU cores.. the server just ran out of resources to cope. That was over 200 IPs per second, but they only did a small number of hits per second per IP, it made it basically a DoS type attack. Difficult to solve and spot.. So we really need DoS protection, but that's another £5 a month.. and who knows if it would end up banning legit users as I wouldn't have much control over it.

Currently all known attacks are dealt with F2B.. Until a new attack appears where there is no rule yet. So if anyone has done any custom fail2ban rules which isn't part of the default setup, then please send them to me as it may help with attacks i've not seen yet. I've already got a LOT of custom rules wrote.

Cleantalk is blocking registration attempts on the wiki and forum like crazy..

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It was starting to get through the regular sign up process and were getting on the forum! Anyway this can really happen is either by brute force on the questions or questions have "got known". Which is kind of worrying considering a lot of the questions are now wanting people to look at store for part numbers to answer the questions... Though I assume the answers have been published somewhere to let the spammers though.. This has happened a few times previously and it is clear that keep changing the questions regularly is turning into another job by itself! I believe the stop forums spam extension broke not long ago as well, I cannot remember why off-hand. So many topics and so many problems each week to deal with..

Plus the attacks on the mail server, the SSH attacks.. The amount of log files which are now monitored is basically all of them now I think! It really is mind blowing the sheer amount of attacks on every single service running on the server. Anything you can think of is under heavy attack. If I had not put the effort in over the past few months, I think the whole server would likely be rather broken and off-line by now. It is why I put considerable effort into mitigating such attacks and also optimising various points on the server to deal with "heavy traffic" better. Always work I have done for free and it sure taken up many hundreds of hours so far!!

It's pretty amazing that when I first set up the server to run this forum, the traffic was practically zero for a long time. While there were undoubtedly some attacks I dealt with at the time, the attacks which server is under these days is just simply unbelievable! Like I said many times, I have essentially been out of work as the pandemic happened and don't have unlimited funds any more. It's not just down to my store purely either. I've literally done no work to pay my "real life bills" for the past weeks or even months now, as all my time has been ploughed into keeping the server online.. Which brings me right back to the topic of this thread...

I have been ploughing so much of my time over the past 30 years into doing Atari stuff and the past several years maintaining the server, paying for it all myself. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for some help financing it all from the community which I am supporting. I will try and save costs for next year by reducing the number of backups and if I don't have to update code daily all the time, I probably won't need ChatGPT which will save a lot of time and costs as well.. I can't really predict what will happen a years time.