Please note the following post is just my opinion on this topic, and not discussed with the owners/mods/etc.

So here is the problem with being willing to donate, but not for a better forum. There is a schema (structure) problem with the site as it is designed. As some of you know, but some don't about a year ago Kestas and A_Tin_Can had to remove a lot of historical data. This is because the site's database structure and the way the forum was designed was never designed to be massively scalable. If even 10% of our users who play games tried to use the forum consistently it would require removing more historical data.

There are other schema problems that make it hard for the site to accommodate a larger number of players playing online at the same time and additional schema issues that will make the site slower as time progresses.

So when Zultar says he's trying to raise money to fix the forum it's a summation of fixing all of these other underlying problems that limit the sites potential for growth. Fixing the forum means redesigning database tables, transferring data out of the existing forum into the new one without losing data, which will lighten the burden on the rest of the site. Removing that burden on the SQL server then allows for many of the other enhancements Zultar listed, and others beyond those, to become feasible.

Another large project that would ideally be included in the development would be building a sustainable installation tool for the site to make it more friendly towards the open source development model. We want people to be able to easily contribute to the sites development but right now it's very difficult to install a test version of the site on your local machine or server. That needs to be corrected so that people with more limited skill sets who want to contribute are able too.

Those are the main barriers preventing the other features Zultar mentioned. Using development money to build new features on an existing database schema that isn't scalable would simply be an irresponsible use of members donations. Which is why the database needs to be fixed, and one of the biggest and easiest ways to get to that goal is by upgrading the forum. I can go more in depth with details if that really is going to be a barrier towards someone donating.

As for donation tiers, I suspect there will be a page relatively soon that will give credit to all members who have donated to the site. Everyone here appreciates donations because without them we wouldn't have this community, and nobody is looking to make donators feel less appreciated if they are unable to contribute on a yearly basis. So I fully expect, and will personally aid with if needed, making some credit page to thank everyone who has ever donated regardless of if you were able too within the past year.

Thanks for the explanation JMO. I was too short in my reply and jumping to conclusions a bit with my post. I don't know what the underlying programming needs are and in donating I trust you guys know what's best. In general I just wanted to say I'm not in principle here for the forum.

It's good to express those concerns regardless. We're asking you for money, and we've thought about it and come up with things we want to do with it, but it's your money, and you're choosing to spend it, so input from the community is important too.

I'm not particularly computer savvy, but could we just have a 'bolt on' forum. I.E. one ready made that the site links to?

Forgive me if this is a naive suggestion.

Is vBulletin still a thing?

I actually like the forum we have a lot. If anything, I'd think a split into a few sub-boards would be best. Rather than just forum, have like three boards:

1. Diplomacy-related (tactics, game sign ups, tournament info, etc.)
2. Politics (probably useless without krellin now)
3. Games and Off-Topic (Mafia, Tell-a-story thread, random shit)

Or

1. Mafia
2. Other

In talking with abge offline about this I realized that a bit more detailed explanation might be useful.

Most forums these days are modeled carefully to limit the data pulled on each page load. So if you load a page it loads X threads and Y replies per thread. And the queries that pull that data are carefully written to prevent too much data being pulled. The tables are setup with indexes that ensure they run quickly. They also have a variety of columns to split data apart intelligently so searching for data for a specific page on the forum, or a specific thread is easy.

So an example of this would be that when a post is made on the forum several "identifier" values are put into the database. Page in forum section = 5, Thread = 1430976, Page in thread = 7, Topic = 'Cats', etc etc. This isn't my specialty, but it's close enough in theory.

Designing a structure that loads a reasonable amount of data in a reasonable amount of time with a reasonable amount of server resources needed to do this is a complicated task. So much so that plug in forums are commonplace these days. Companies build forums for sites for reasonable fees based on their designed structure that keeps it running fast and efficiently.

Our forum has none of this design, the site attempts to load way too much data at once, and the tables the data is stored in only identify the data by 1 column, the threadID. There is no column to identify the page. So the site does a ton of calculations on the fly to figure out which threads to show, which posts to show per thread per page, etc.

All those calc's are hitting tables that aren't properly indexed for fast data retrieval, so as more and more forum posts are made the site gets slower and slower overall, increasingly so with each user on it.

I work with databases for a living, writing SQL, redesigning systems and the like. And with my experience I still cannot think of a way to fix the existing forum structure in a way that would allow us to keep historical data without moving to one of these more efficient forum structures. My understanding is that ATC and Kestas both looked into fixing this problem too last year when the site was crashing, and were unable come up with a quickly feasible long term solution, which was why some of the historical data had to be removed.

Fixing this problem with an entirely new forum structure will allow the sites processing power to be devoted to new game based features instead of playing damage control for a currently unsolvable problem. Which is why any donations to help achieve this goal, as well as multiple new game features are being requested.

JMO, what about doing a one-time calc while the site is down and sorting the threads by thread ID, giving each a page number (starting at 1) from the oldest, but when displaying, the page numbers get reversed for display?

that would sort the threads by the date they were made, not the latest post in them, wouldn't it?

Oh, yeah, never mind :p

Thanks, JMO, this makes much more sense now. This is really much more than making the forum look nicer (which I'd argue is unnecessary) but it seems it's needed for the stability and growth of the site. Adding improvements (GR Integration, etc) to the current implementation seems like it would be a lot of wasted effort at this point, so fixing the Forum is really a precursor to other changes.

I'm interested in knowing what the final outcome of the donation badges will be. I still believe that they should be for a period of one year. On another page you could keep a running total.

Does the thread table not have a "last post time" column? You could query for the top X amount times the current page for the user.

@Chaqa, there is just 1 table, wD_ForumMessages which does have a last post time column and that is basically what the site is doing. It just isn't doing a good enough job. There are ways, which I'm not familiar with, that need a different schema setup to make a really efficient forum. The fact that there are successful companies who make forums entirely makes me pretty confident that we couldn't really do comparative justice with what they do. If someone can figure out a scalable way to do this without the cost we'll obviously consider it, but from everything I've seen this is really something we have to address.

@ssorenn, agreed. I think Zultar is away for a couple days so I expect he'll address that when he gets back.

If you turned the users access to the form to a plug in or something complicated, I believe you could drive away some of your user population, and reduce the amount of new users coming on. I think this because I joined as a student using a school computer, and on this computer plugins are blocked, and so are most sites that are overly complicated and use the keyword "Game." For me this wont be a problem as I go off to collage next year, but It might restrict some students participation. I enjoy the basic format of the form, and so if there was a way to keep the format and change the storage I think that many users would appreciate that.

Gday Zultar, as an irregular player over the past 7 years, i think this site is great and helps re-kindle long days playing the old board game when i was a kid. great work and really appreciate everything you guys are doing.

With a better understanding of the issue, I have a few thoughts:

1) I love our Forum layout. It builds a sense of community and creates a very conversational, personal atmosphere. I truly believe a traditional multi-threaded Forum that you see all over the web would be devastating for our community. While I understand and agree with the need to overhaul the code, I (and I think many others) would love the end result to have the same feel.

With that being said, with the new infrastructure, some things could be added to address some people have with the forum. Tagging could be incorporated with filters (Diplomacy, Mafia, Politics, Congo, etc) allowing people to populate their feed with whatever tags they are interested in.

2) I would like to see the code be open source on github, just as it is now. I think that has really helped our community and would hopefully allow us to have volunteers maintain and improve the code in the future without having to pay again, which is not something we could probably sustain.

3) I agree with ss that donor tags should be annual. This nebulous donor status shelf-life is not a good way to encourage people to contribute. And, again, I think with an annual contribution, these brackets are way too high.

Overall, though, I think we've tried the volunteer route long enough. ATC, JMO, VDip, etc have done a great job, but unless there is someone like Kestas who wants to fully develop this as a project, this probably will not get done without paying.

Boop

Hey so I might just be a lowly noob to the site, but I literally can't find where to donate. Maybe put a link to it in the FAQ or just a button on the front page? Does anyone have a link to donate?

There's a link to it in the FAQ under Server Specific -> Donations. It's a hotlinked image that says 'Make a Donation'.

I dont know if this will work, but https://www.paypal.com/webapps/shoppingcart?xclick_params=YnVzaW5lc3MlM2RrZXN0YXMlMmVqJTJlayUyNTQwZ21haWwlMmVjb20lMjZpdGVtX25hbWUlM2RwaHBEaXBsb21hY3klMjZub19zaGlwcGluZyUzZDAlMjZub19ub3RlJTNkMSUyNmN1cnJlbmN5X2NvZGUlM2RBVUQlMjZ0YXglM2QwJTI2bGMlM2RBVSUyNmJuJTNkUFAlMmREb25hdGlvbnNCRiUyNmNoYXJzZXQlM2RVVEYlMmQ4JTI2Y21kJTNkX3MlMmR4Y2xpY2slMjZmb3JjZV9zYSUzZHRydWUlMjZub2RlX2NhbF9pZCUzZDhiYmUzYmJmYzIyOTUlMjYlMjZ3YV90eXBlJTNkQnV5Tm93JTI2&flowlogging_id=8bbe3bbfc2295&mfid=1483222718762_bc20822aa6300#/checkout/openButton

When you click on help, the description for the FAQ section now mentions that is where you can find information on donating. Hopefully that makes it a little easier for people to find. I also changed the wording from Donations to How to Donate.

jmo, are you a mod or not? because under the help tab, you are listed as a mod... I am guessing that anyone with a comedy cube is listed under mod, but just thought I should ask.

@reedeer1, no I am not. That page runs a query which automatically pulls everyone with mod or admin status from the database. I am a part time developer with server access so I can make improvements or so I can look into any bugs that come up. Being an "admin" gives me access to some special debugging tools that help look into problems. Since I just added some new variants I'm keeping the admin tools for a few days so I can make sure those new games types don't have any problems.

Thanks to everyone for the feedback and answers thus far. I enjoy our forum as it is now as well. I like the idea of being able to create threads that have specific tags and people can choose to see particular tags. Much of this is up to how technical issues can be solved to enable our site to grow and respond to changes and updates. The source code and upgrades will remain open source on github and the mods and I are going to work with the new dev to try to make installation easier so people can test things out better and make improvements easier.

In terms of the donation, after thinking about this for the past couple of days and reading everyone's feedback here and privately, here are my thoughts. First, we don't do donation drives every year anyway; the pattern has been every two to three years, and I would like to keep it that way. If we are able to secure the $10,000 goal, it will take us time to find a dev and to do all the upgrades and updates, and it will be time and effort intensive for the mod team and I that we won't be able to keep it up every year and it's unlikely we can get another large donation again so soon. Second, as others have remarked, the necessary updates that we want to keep the site operating and growing over the next few years aren't going to be cheap or free, hence the need to raise a substantial amount of funds. If anyone donates a large amount of $500 or $1,000 or more, I want to honor that. At the same time, there is also the need to recognize those who have donated previously. Taking all that into account, here is what I propose as a compromise/solution:

1. The donation badge will last from one donation drive to the next with a minimum of two years, and the level depends on how much is donated in the donation cycle.

2. The donation levels stay as they are, but there are two separate pages honoring donations, one for the most current donation drive, and one for cumulative donation. As mentioned in #1, your donation badge that shows in your profile is determined by how much you donated in the most current donation drive, and your donation level will be shown in the current donation drive page. The other page, however, shows your cumulative level of donation, which can be different than your current donation drive. Your donation level in the cumulative page reflects the total amount (donation level shown, not dollar amount) that you have donated to the site.

To make this more concrete, I think some examples may clarify. For example, if you have never donated before, and you donate $50 today and $50 next year, your badge will be silver first and turn into gold the next year. If you donate in 2016 or in this current donation drive, it will last until the next donation drive or at least the beginning of 2019. If you donated $50 a while ago, say 2013 and you donate $50 this year, your badge level that shows on the site is silver, but in the cumulative page, your donation level is gold.

I think this solution will honor those who have donated currently and how much they donated but does not diminish how much they have donated to the site. It's important that we recognize that. Let me know if that makes sense or if more examples are needed.

On a related note, I want to briefly thank people who have donated to the site and those who have donated so far during this drive. I will provide an update of how much has been donated during this drive and the people at each donation level by the end of next week, and I will update this information periodically so we can all see how much has been donated and if we can meet or exceed our goal.

Zultar just wants to be the only one with a platinum star

For past drives, I remember you posting the donate button on the front page. It may be worthwhile to do it again. I know it's not hard to find now but never underestimate how lazy some of us are.

^^^ plus a running total

The Help button has now been reconfigured to be Help/Donate and Donate is at the very top. I hope that's more than adequate.