I meant to add:

I assume Kestas would know if we're not getting value for money from our current hosts - but out of interest, how expensive would it be to move to someone more reliable, or just upgrade out bandwidth with Dreamhost? I know a donation drive is not the same as a permanent increase in income but I'm sure a lot of people on here would be happy to help out if we could reduce downtime/errors as a result... Thoughts anyone?

Glad it helps, though I'm a bit sad to see it comes up often enough that it'd be noticed so soon :-( I thought it happened more rarely

These days I'm a bit more pragmatic and less ideological about running the site hopsyturvy; if people would rather have ads on the page than experience the downtime I think we could afford dedicated hosting (we definitely can't under Plura, they're too unreliable).
I'm okay with whatever most people prefer, but the status quo is the default

A donation drive, no matter how generous a vast minority of people are, will never match the overall flow of a steady source of site income. There's no doubt we'd need to go to ads to support better hosting, and unless people are getting internal server errors a lot more than I think they are I think it's fine the way it is

Presumably you can measure how often people are seeing it?

I got it this morning, I refreshed a couple of times and then it was fine. I get it a couple of times a week at most, so it's not killing my experience of the site - I just wonder if it ever means people lose orders/posts if an error occurs while submitting data? I'm not aware that I've lost anything this way, but I guess it must be a possibility. But like I said, it's not enough to bother me.

As to ads, they wouldn't bother me if they weren't too intrusive, but in other ways I really like the 'purity' of the site and I think people respond to that (learning about what happened with playdiplomacy — after paying for a years premium membership — was how I ended up moving to this site in the first place).

So I guess what I'm saying is that as far as I'm concerned, the status quo is fine.

Perhaps we should have a donation drive anyway - not so that we can get better server space, but so that you can have a holiday or a swanky meal out or something. Would it embarrass you too much if I tried keeping a thread to that effect running on the forum for a while? I know a few people responded to a thread not too long ago, but I bet lots of people are still unaware of how this runs..

how much is dedicated hosting?

i mean, if 100 players donated 10€ each that would pay for hosting for 5 years on some hosts.

I know there are more than 100 players here, and some of them have full-time jobs. 10€ isn't that much for those people. In fact for me it is one hour working - which i would gladly donate to keep the site up for a few years... (i've already gotten several years worth of entertainment from webdiplomacy)

I got the internal server error a couple of times last week, and I've been playing for over a year so it's not that bad. Maybe time of day has something to do with it.

Anyway, the German webdiplomacy site (http://diplomacy.s-website.de/index.php) has ads. It is after the map and before the orders. It makes it harder to see the board when writing orders, but it's a livable situation.

> Presumably you can measure how often people are seeing it?
I think it appears in the log files, but internal server errors are by definition outside of webdiplomacy's own error-handing routines. Once you see that page it's already beyond the control of any of our code.
This means I don't see a whole heap of errors with cause and effect listed at the bottom of the page, like I do for webdip-handled errors, I can only find out about them by e-mails I get (or by frequently checking the logfiles I guess, I could script that I suppose)


Also thanks for the thought but I'm happy with the FAQ paypal icon :-) and you're right that I think the ad/premium-free-ness of the site is a good thing which should be maintained.

I was also thinking about a bounty system so donations can go directly to anyone willing to implement a feature request, with credit given to donor and implementer with a moderator&server-fee tax or something, so that that generosity can go directly into improving the site in a transparent and public way.
It might not pan out but I think there a lot of people who would pay for improvements in the right environment at the right price

I'd gladly put another tenner in towards that. But really I was thinking, people expect the money to go towards better hosting etc etc - but I thought it'd be nice if a few of us could put together a smaller pot dedicated to giving Kestas a good time, with strict instructions on no account to use it to anything benefiting webdiplomacy :)

The bounty system sounds interesting - but I can see it ending in tears if somebody develops a requested feature that doesn't fit with another new feature, or with your long term plans for the code, or just generally makes things messy, and you have to veto implementing it..

I must say, I think the ad-free, premium-free part of this site is a really good part of the site that sets it apart.

bounty system - 50% sever tax

so half of what you donate to a feature goes to the developer and the other half goes to the server account. (of course once the server costs are covered for the next three decades you can reduce that %...)

Not sure if such a funding system would actually motivate people to do the development work or not.