you are genius, realy 
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I tried to get Gisele to model some of our shirts and stuff…but Tom is making her polish his rings or something.
We’ll figure it out (regarding the sustainability of the site). We already get some donations here and there, which is really nice, but at the risk of being repetitive, I mostly want to make sure both the member experience and the admin side are enjoyable and not something that people go “ugh…I gotta find the time to do that”. I’m lucky in that my “ugh…I gotta do that” tends to be related to putting together an article for the main site page. It has less to do with the work of doing it than putting down the thing I’m playing with to do the formatting and writing. Which is why it has taken me a year or more to publish a VTOL VR article…it seems like I’m having too much fun with it to write about it at the moment.
The stuff that drives the site (X+Y+Z = Mudspike) is far less glamorous and much more work. I look at the menus that run the site and my eyes glaze over. I was just looking at the AWS main menu that has a bunch of really crazy stuff all over it. Glaciers, Control Towers, GuardDuty, Pesonal Health Dashboard (is that like a personal trainer to keep me in shape? Right on…)… Honestly I don’t know how IT and techie wizards know how to work all that stuff. Seems like it is constantly evolving (it is) and constantly trying to break interoperability (it is?). That’s why I became a pilot. Lots of buttons, but most of them don’t do anything.
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There’s nothing stopping people from donating at the link in the ‘about us’ page.
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Well so there is, thats cool I never knew about it.
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Yeah that completely escaped me.
Not a huge fan of paypal. If you’re considering other payment methods like patreon, i’d definately be willing to help offset your infrastructure costs.
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I had no idea that was there. I’ll happily donate to enjoy this site.
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I’m very much willing to Donate. We have a really nice community here and it would be great to keep us all together.
I understand the risks of asking for money driving site traffic away but in the forums at least its a concentrated group of people who are actively involved and I don’t see those people jumping ship if you ask for a little help.
I’m still a relatively new member so I don’t assume to have a say in this matter but I really have enjoyed my time here and I’m grateful to the staff for the work they do here to keep the place nice.
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Ditto
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Same thing for me. I buy everything I write on just so I don’t get accused of being a [insert-developer-name] shill. Most of what I get early access to I already pre-ordered anyway.
For me, the forums here are something special, especially with the Mudspike Christmas Challenge. I haven’t found anything like that anywhere else.
@BeachAV8R @fearlessfrog Do you guys think the increased traffic to the site is reponsible for the increase in bandwidth costs? If costs are becoming harder on Chris’ wallet… I can gladly give a little donation if that helps.
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No, the Guides section is handled in another area that we don’t pay for in the same way, so they aren’t a problem. I think generally it is just that we are attracting page views which leads to some people sticking around, checking out the forums, and reading both new and old stuff. It isn’t prohibitively expensive, and I don’t anticipate it being so for a few years, so while I appreciate help in offset costs, I’m still chalking it up to the cost of my hobby. 
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That’s… When I joined.
I’m so sorry Chris 
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I thought for sure it was when the Farmer was announced.
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I don’t wish to make this…uncomfortable. But there are ways to help defray the costs among your friends. For some, this forum enhances the hobby more than any single add-on or module. A simple “donate” button—set it and forget it. Once its there, treat it like Fight Club.
@discobot’s gotta eat you know!
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Already there bro, from the “about” page:
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Yeah…we could probably make the donate button a bit more obvious. I really don’t mind the expenses, but looking toward the future it would be a good idea to put a plan in place for some slight growth or prices going up on the services we do use. @fearlessfrog, @Fridge, and @Troll are discussing the options available and we’ll see what shakes out.
Thank you to those that have donated recently and in the past - we do appreciate the support. And those that don’t want to or can’t, we appreciate the participation just as well.
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Ah cool, thanks. Easy to miss that stuff with an iPhone.
(Just checked. The “Donate” button doesn’t display on my phone unless I switch to desktop mode.)
Just though I would add to the Forum v. Discord discussion.
Recently myself and @Franze have been talking about a lot of mission design. We have a PM thread for it, but what we have started doing that last couple days is doing the discussion in discord chat and then posting the results or findings of our topic of chat in the PM.
Searching past dozens of messages is a pain, so having the forum where we can refer back to the “highlights” makes things a lot easier.
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There’s a lot of pros and cons, and a lot of things can be done in Discord using customization and bots.
Generally I think Discord is being preferred where the emphasis is on more um, ephemeral discussions, or put another way, where you can talk ■■■■ and it doesn’t matter because it’s scrolling up and people don’t tend to search etc. A public forum is a bit different, in that a good chunk of people finding the topics will be google searches etc - so basically stuff sticks around longer. Forums tend to have the ‘broken windows’ problem, while discord is not like that.
Public Discords (where anyone can join with a published perma-invite) are quite the different beast to one where you can ‘hand-picked’ to join and it’s just a bunch of friends. Big Discords tend to be a bit chaotic, so my guess is that Discord as a product will start adding features to help with that. Places like Hoggit are worth a join to get a feel for it.
It’s an interesting area to see the social dynamics play out, a bit like the difference between generations of people preferring words vs videos - there is a split where people rarely love both ways. In some ways Discord is sort of like a reddit v2, in that there is a land grab to make a popular one, while you can also ‘be your own moderator’ and it’s essentially a free platform to go make your own community. Having to set up a site and such used to be a limiting factor, but things like reddit and discord now make it so anyone can be their own boss, they just need some recruits to come in.
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That’s an interesting way to do it. It allows discussion and then allows an easy way to ignore the discussion and cut to the facts
BTW: There are a couple people on the fourms here who do mission development, so feel free to make a thread about it.