@Zultar - What does the adamantium badge look like?

LOL, I haven't figured out what platinum and adamantium look like yet, but maybe three claws for adamantium?

I have an idea

http://i.imgur.com/f95XfOy.png

:(

Actually the text says Co -Site Owner for platinum currently. When it's fixed, the star should say site co-owner.

Platinum and Adamantium donors should get an actual Platinum or Adamantium medal sent to them in the mail, plus a certificate signed by Zultar, Kestas, and Jmo.

They could wear their medal at F-T-F gaming events and conventions... or when making love to their RealDolls.

I found a good adamant medal icon

http://i.imgur.com/XR6xo73.png

Solution:
Adamantium- X-men symbol black and gold
Platinum- silver with white line through to illustrate its shinier

I gave but did not see where to tell them whom I am

jamiet is being disrespectfull

Would it be possible for us to know what company you consider working with and stuff like that? I know that $10,000 is realistic for all the stuff you mentioned for instance, but there's no harm in using this community to see if anyone has a better suggestion for you. Of course, the site owner keeps the veto, but I think it's only fair to be transparent and listen to the community where you can when asking for this kind of money. I for one would like to hear.

Also, just a clarification: is this fund kept seperately from the donations towards hosting the site? I'm just curious.

On a less serious note, perhaps the One Who Shall Not Be Named would be interested in doing this ;-)

You should hire steephie

You should not hire steephie.

We've asked for suggestions for months. If you have suggestions about who can do this stuff, let us know. You can reach us at [email protected]. As of yet, we don't know who will do this for us. I am working on finding such a dev.

This donation drive is kept separate from the donations hosting the site.

On that last note, thanks for the laugh, but we have seen said person's codes multiple times on the forum and we would rather have a broad expert to do the work than said person. ;)

On a more serious note though, the site's code is open source and if you think you can contribute to the features we are looking for, please feel free to work on it.

You might be missing my point, I'm not sure. I'll clarify just to be safe.

What I mean is that you're suddenly going from completely voluntary without any kind of payment to a professional full-cost solution, without exploring the middle ground. I can imagine that there's suitable people in the community who are looking for this kind of project and don't want $250/hour for it, but don't want to do it for free either. They might just want compensation for their time, because time is money, but still ask far less for a good job.

Did you explore that option as well? That's what I meant.
Of course, if you consider this an option as well, you do need to decide whether you would be willing to work with people who have the skills but lack a great portfolio and therefore aren't risk-free. Those would be most likely to fall under this option.

Basically, with this kind of thing you can either take the premium sure-fire approach for $10k or the 'mostly qualified but not risk-free' approach of, say, $4k.

Similarly, are you going for a risk-free American, Australian or Western European company or are you going for the skilled-and-cheap Indian or Polish (I know Polish might not be your first guess but I've heard good things about a company there actually!) people?
The advantage of hiring cheaper people is that you can have two shots at it and still pay roughly the same in the end.

Right now, you make it sound like getting the job done costs $10k, period. In reality, it's heavily dependent on your exact criteria for the people you're hiring in particular.
I'm not telling you what your criteria should be. I can't decide that for you. Just make sure that you make a conscious decision there, and consider sharing that decision with us.

My programming skills won't help this site any further I'm afraid. Right now, I merely try to know enough about programming languages to be able to see the difference between an unskilled worker and an undervalued expert.

Where were you when the pen was full and the paper blank?

Until I read this thread, I was under the impression that the plan was to spend no money on development. I'm pretty sure I suggested something like this before, but there wasn't much enthusiasm for spending money on development yet.

Anyway, just trying to contribute in my way. If zultar would rather have me shut up, he should let me know and I find that completely acceptable.

Spending $10k for a website like this should be a reiterative process anyway. Consider, consider from another perspective and reconsider some more, then make the deal.

If there is any member of the site who has the interest and ability to work on this for compensation, I'm sure they've read this same thread and would contact zultar.

That's a fair point.

Bumpo

Donate button says: "If you decide to donate by clicking the button below please let me know your username so we can add a donator marker to your profile."

Doesn't specify who 'me' is, or how to contact 'me'. You might want to specify.

Donations update are in. After talking with some more people and seeing how donations are coming in, I've decided to adjust the donation levels a bit. I am moving silver down to $25, gold at $50, platinum at $100, and adamantium at $500. If you donate more during this drive, I will update your donation level accordingly. These new icons do not exist yet, but once they do, I will give them out accordingly. If there is a donation at $1,000 or more, I will create a new donation level for it.

As of today, we have a total of $1,540 (rounded to the nearest ten). The donators in no particular orders are:

Bronze: thatwasawkward, jamiet99uk, peregrine falcon, chumbles, thegatso, kokodarick, lamson

Silver: Hannibal76, eturnage, twinsnation

Gold: MKECharlie

Platinium: swordsman3003, Doug7878, Hellenic Riot

Adamantium: zultar, jmo1121109

Thank you to those who have donated so far! I am working on adding ways that people can donate.

Please guys, donate as you can. This is our big push to get more features for the site and improve many of the functionalities that we need and want.

Thanks everyone for donating as much as you have! I hope we can make it to our goal so we can get all hose new features we want.

I don't understand why a site which doesn't have unlimited amounts of resources would keep trying to re-invent the wheel for a non-specialised aspect of its site ... especially when that wheel is kinda square and lumpy and drags along the ground. It's an off-putting shambles that makes it impossible to know where anything is and where most major announcements are hidden away so that most users never see them.

Ideally, just drop in vBulletin for forums and put technical effort into the Diplomacy engine, such as keeping as many good formats available as possible, especially World Diplomacy IX.

@Kremmen, what specifically is your concern?

@jmo, what is unclear to you? After many years in IT, I conclude that it is very seldom worthwhile even for a full-time professional development team to engage in creating an in-house solution when an off-the-shelf package exists to do the job. It's best to put development resources into those areas for which standard packages don't exist.

But if some people really like this current forum system and it creates a heavy load, how about this: Just give us an option to get rid of it from the home page. Most people don't read the forums anyhow. If the computationally expensive forum display was only occurring for the minority who actually use it, the current system could probably be used indefinitely at no extra cost.

@kremmen, why are you under the impression that what you've mentioned has been ruled out?

Thanks all for the generous donations so far, and thanks to Zultar for leading it. We'll be sure to squeeze every cent out of every donation. Apologies if I haven't written anyone back personally to express thanks, I have to keep track of each paypal e-mail individually.

If you haven't written me yourself to ask to be given a donor flag I'll be doing that in bulk by matching up your donor e-mail against your account, which is much easier to do all at once after the drive is over, so thanks for being patient.

Cheers all,
Kestas

My gibbering gods, how excessively wealthy are swordsman3003, Doug7878, Hellenic Riot and jmo1121109 that they have over 100 Austrian dollars to splash on improvements to a Diplomacy website?

I mean, well done to you, and I'm sure the site will benefit from your contributions, but you guys must not be short of a few bob.