Please contribute money to a new server infrastructure

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Dave
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Please contribute money to a new server infrastructure

Post by Dave »

(cc to wesnoth-dev)

All,

As you may be aware, we have been having trouble finding adequate hosting for all the services we want to offer to our user community. In particular, the resources to run our forums have been difficult to come by, and the resources to run the multiplayer server have been even more difficult.

Rather than continuing to rely on scrapping together server resources from various donors who have varying quality of service, I think that the Wesnoth community is robust enough now for us to pay for a quality service.

According to our estimates, with the rate our user community is growing, we will hit a wall by the end of the year. We would like to move onto better hosting now, but in any case we want to have contingencies ready so we can do something by the end of the year.

Having our own infrastructure will also hopefully allow us to do many more cool things that we haven't previously been able to do. We hope, for instance, to be able to integrate the forums with wesnothd, such that registering on the forums will automatically register your name on wesnothd, and vice-versa. Then, you could also choose to record your stats at stats.wesnoth.org, so if your stats are recorded, anyone could go and look up your username, and see which campaigns you've played, and how you did in them!

As such, I am asking for the Wesnoth community to contribute money toward paying for server hosting. We estimate it will cost about $1500 to $2000 annually to pay for hosting. We are hoping to raise at least $500 initially, and then will see if donations are adequate to cover our costs, or if advertising will also be necessary. (Don't worry, we will make sure that any advertising we do will be as unintrusive as possible, and will offer support to anyone who wants to turn it off).

If you would like to contribute money to this, please send me funds using PayPal. You can send to david@whitevine.net -- note that funds sent will be considered a personal gift to me.

If anyone has any questions or concerns, please let me know of them.

Thanks!

David
Last edited by ivanovic on April 1st, 2008, 7:49 am, edited 3 times in total.
Reason: fixing linebreaks
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tsr
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Re: Please contribute money to a new server infrastructure

Post by tsr »

Nice, finally :)

One suggestion, could you keep us posted on how the fundraising is going, so we can adjust our donations?

/tsr
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thespaceinvader
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Re: Please contribute money to a new server infrastructure

Post by thespaceinvader »

April 1st may not have been the best time to start the campaign =P

Glad to see a push for funding, though.
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Dave
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Re: Please contribute money to a new server infrastructure

Post by Dave »

tsr wrote: One suggestion, could you keep us posted on how the fundraising is going, so we can adjust our donations?
Good point.

So far this is what we have,

- starting amount from previous gifts: ~$200
- gifts generously given when people heard about server problems: ~$120
- gifts given since this thread started: ~$280

Total amount we now have: $600.

This is probably enough to start, but if we got to around $1800 we'd be able to get a substantial discount for ordering a server for an entire year.

Thanks to everyone who has sent money!

David
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Re: Please contribute money to a new server infrastructure

Post by chains »

I own part of a professional dedicated server company, and I'd be willing to donate a dedicated server at my monthly cost. Which will probably work out at about half of what you'll pay from your average hosting company. I'd give you the server for free, but I still have to pay for the electricity and bandwidth.
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Re: Please contribute money to a new server infrastructure

Post by Dave »

chains,

Thank you for your generous offer. I will send you a private message about it shortly and we can discuss it further.

David
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Ken_Oh
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Re: Please contribute money to a new server infrastructure

Post by Ken_Oh »

If you're not quite getting the collections you want, maybe you could try setting up a PayPal "store" where supporters can contribute without having to have a PayPal account.
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Re: Please contribute money to a new server infrastructure

Post by db0 »

Donated.

And you've got mail ;)
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Re: Please contribute money to a new server infrastructure

Post by tr0ll »

I'm not convinced that having the game server(s), website, wiki, forums, etc all on the same box is a good idea. One example: the multiplayer server gets bogged down with some error message, so people flood the forums looking for info, thereboy doubly DoS-ing the box so admins can't even fix stuff. Or what if the forum gets slashdotted? I guess what i'm suggesting is, don't move everything over at once if you don't have to. Maybe cross-server logins could work with LDAP or OpenId.

My donation is coming shortly (have to refill my paypal account). Cheers and good luck!
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Re: Please contribute money to a new server infrastructure

Post by Jodwin »

tr0ll wrote:I'm not convinced that having the game server(s), website, wiki, forums, etc all on the same box is a good idea. One example: the multiplayer server gets bogged down with some error message, so people flood the forums looking for info, thereboy doubly DoS-ing the box so admins can't even fix stuff. Or what if the forum gets slashdotted? I guess what i'm suggesting is, don't move everything over at once if you don't have to. Maybe cross-server logins could work with LDAP or OpenId.
Something slightly similar happened to the small Australian game developer Infinite Interactive a short while ago. They recently released a free online multiplayer puzzle/wargame hybrid which got blogged on a number of gaming websites. The amount of people brought in through other websites to play the game was so large that it brought down not only the game, but also the company's website and forum which, among other things, are essentials in customer support. :|
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Re: Please contribute money to a new server infrastructure

Post by CoolGoose »

One host that holds VPS for forum/website/wiki/game server is imho the best idea.
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Re: Please contribute money to a new server infrastructure

Post by Woodwizzle »

Donations are great, (i would if I could but right now I'm pretty broke and looking for a better paying job, if all works out and I get my bills payed I'll throw down a few bucks though). The store idea tho will most likely result in a more steady stream of cash if the items are good quality. Wesnoth shirts that would look cool to people even they don't know what wesnoth is (unlike the previous hex shirts) A mousepad with keyboard shortcuts listed on it, or the unit tree or something similar would be useful to players and worth the money etc.

Just something to think about since if we do get a new server, at one point we will have to buy next year's service.
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doofus-01
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Re: Please contribute money to a new server infrastructure

Post by doofus-01 »

For those of us without Paypal, is there a PO box we can send a donation to?

EDIT: I just saw there was another donations thread. Maybe this one can be locked, or at least not linked to from the homepage, so idiots like me don't keep resurrecting it.
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Re: Please contribute money to a new server infrastructure

Post by mortalus »

Hello all,
New player here but much intrigued by the game. Anyhow, do you recieve monies from this source ~ http://www.cafepress.com/buy/wesnoth/-/source_searchBox ?
Thanks,
mortalus
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Re: Please contribute money to a new server infrastructure

Post by scienceguy8 »

I don't think we do. If we did, those would be using the newest art available.
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