Donate THIS!

[Scarecrow]

Originally Posted by Future_Sniper_

it seems like people are trying to make this into a competition, like $101? isnt that a little excessive, maybe if your rich I dont know. Wheres the money gonna go when asc's fee's have been paid, are we gonna do fundraisers and have big get togethers and free food? like I dont know, just throwing ideas into the air here.

I think you take post #1 at face value and decide if you agree with the premise or not and go from there. I know there are those who totally disagree (outraged would be a better word) with this and those who don't care and those who think its a good idea. Some people could be competing, but, who cares except those who compete at it? and for what they are competing for, I wouldn't know. Last time I checked, I wasn't worried what anyone spent their money on, as its none of my business (btw, if you buy Excel BBs your hair will fall out and your balls will shrink...).

As far as accountability of the funds, its a donation and nothing in post #1 is indicating there is any obligation to disclose anything to anyone, or be responsible to anyone for any of it. Again, caveat emptor. If you have expectations of something in return for the donation aside from a little graphic, don't bother donating because you will be disappointed I am sure.

As for the levels, I'm on other forums that do something similar, so from my experience, there is nothing unusual or unique about that. Does it foster competition? I suppose... to those who care about such things.

Originally Posted by rebort

maybe HoJo will get something else..

My suggestion? http://www.realdoll.com/sample12.asp

... oooohhhh Britney....

[Bordush]

More kitten Pictures!!!

[Tru]

Originally Posted by Bordush

More kitten Pictures!!!

Thats something I thought I'd never read on an airsoft forum. :lol:

[shinjit noir]

Originally Posted by Future_Sniper_

Out of curiousity, wheres all this money going. I hear everyone saying they love to support asc, but is asc really this expensive to host? Wasnt this site originally made or intended to be made for Tru's selling of airsoft goods and exchanging of airsoft goods? Didnt he always pay for this in the past? Just seems abit odd all of a sudden we are trying to do fund raising for asc but we dont really know where its all going, all we know is we get free web space.

Im pretty sure at this rate asc could be funded for a few years, it seems like people are trying to make this into a competition, like $101? isnt that a little excessive, maybe if your rich I dont know. Wheres the money gonna go when asc's fee's have been paid, are we gonna do fundraisers and have big get togethers and free food? like I dont know, just throwing ideas into the air here.

Are they demanding money? No. This is simply allowing users that want to pitch in some money to say thanks. Does it have to do with anyone getting a free ride? I don't think so either.

The vibe I'm getting from your post is that you want something out of your money, but you fail to see that if you do donate, your money is going towards what you're using now: ASC. If your opinion is against that, well you don't have to pay, it's as simple as that.

[conrad]

Originally Posted by conrad

As soon as I get some money into my paypal account it'll be going straight to ASC :salute:

I lose gooooooooooold!!

paypal sent, more will come as i get more $ into my paypal account :nod:

[Ace12GA]

Hojo has dropped a lot of money on this server; a lot. Any one of the mods will tell you he agonized over the decision to ask for donations. In the end however, I am glad to support this site, and Hojo, who has put a lot into it. Tell me where you can get indefinite hosting of 100mb of files for as little as $20, without ads, or other crap. So in the very least, think of it in terms of buying a service, thats a great deal. If that doesn't work for you, just think about all this site has given you for free.

So far as Tru goes, well I already give him my money, so I don't feel bad.

[Bravo One-Six]

The server, which is OURS aka ASCs.. dedicated.. was purchased for ~$1000 if I'm not mistaken. Miles forked out his OWN money for that.

Where's your money going? Well at the very least it's going to pay for some of that personal expenditure. Already that money has put in to more RAM and theres plans to expand the storage with a backup system as well. Money still comes from other sources (NOT DONATIONS) to host this site, and pay monthly fees and upkeep. All of the mods and admins STILL work for free and all of the effort they put in to the site is volunteer.

I think very few people have ever dumped a thousand dollars on the COMMUNITY here. Some game hosts and such do, but usually there is a bit of recouperation of funds through fees. So if anyone is going to complain about the TOTALLY VOLUNTARY donations, they should probably check to see the last time they gave out a grand for all of us.

Again, these are completely voluntary donations. This is not a pay site, this is not a scam, and your money goes towards improving the boards. I don't give money to the cancer society and expect them to take me out for dinner, but I appreciate the work they do so I help out. If you enjoy using ASC and want to contribute, please do. Many have and we appreciate it. If not? Then who cares? No one is twisting your arm here. We could in theory offer nothing in exchange, but we have the extra webspace and bandwidth so why not give a little something back?

And Don, I recommend that if you are so in doubt of the money involved.. you go do some research about how much it costs to get a dedicated server and tons of bandwidth. Let me know what you find.

[BloodSport]

Just wanted to say thanks to HoJo and the other admins who have been supporting ASC, in the year I've been a member of this community I've seen nothing but continuous upgrades and added levels of security to prevent hackers from destroying the information stored on here, the added benefits of the site also being updated with new features to make it easier to navigate, search (which were still trying to get most people to do), and most importantly to find information is great. HoJo alone has put countless hours keying in data and code to make these updates happen, if he needs help to buy the hardware to be able to do so, and to help keep this server running as smoothly as possible, then yeah asking for donations is the right thing to do. I was surprised there wasnt a donation or membership fee already in place considering the amount of work already when I first joined last year before the new server upgrade and the change to this vBulletin version.

So to keep this simple, keep up the great work guys!

[BawBag]

I was kind of lonely only being 2 platinum members so since I've seen a few more people have it I'm REALLY happy. I bet it would bring a tear to HoJo's eye if even more people showed they cared that much

[infernal]

I agree somewhat with what Future_Sniper said... and he has the right to express his opinion. So relax.

On another note if you paid over a grand for a server, you are mis-managing your money. A dual drive backup rack server on a linux platform will run you less than $700 shipped with PSU and you can get a battery backup for under $100. You're co-lo should provide most of this for you, so the server should be all you need (provided you have a co-lo). For that price, you are running just shy of a half a terrabyte on a 10mbit line.

Doesn't it seem kind of interesting to charge $40 for 250mb of webhosting with ftp access... espsecially if this site does run on a fast line (10mbit +)... with the amount of people that are contributing... you could see your hosting bills go through the roof.

For the person that said go reasearch, dedicated hosting is not that expensive. Burstable WiLan has come down alot over the past 24 months and is available at 5mb and 10mb burstable in your home for much less than t1 or greater. Most people that host via dedicated lines are running hundreds of other hosting contracts to make up for the costs, so its not a huge deal. It would be financial suicide and completely stupid to pay for a dedicated fiber line to run one single website. Instead, a more appropriate application of resources would be in the form of purchasing either dedicated or virtual rackspace from a someone like servermatrix. Your money is better spent there considering you have more than 14 mainframe connections routing your server.

Myself, I run 6 rack servers at q9 in calgary, so unfortunatly I actually know what I'm talking about. I do routing for 4,700 hotels all with 10mbit+ fiber connections worldwide.

Now I'm not saying I have anything against the donations... I feel they are great. I know the actual CODING of the site takes quite a bit of man hours. Hopefully enough gets raised that some really cool new features can be released, and we can start seing some forward moving development very soon.

I myself will probably contribute to the fund as I use this site quite a bit. Miles, you have done some great work on this site. Should you need any assistance in administration or coding the website, I would be glad to sponsor some of my time to your cause.

[Blackthorne]

Depending on what chassis you are running I may be able to help out in the memory area...I can get Compaq memory in various flavour at low low prices (READ: FREE)

[MMMiles!]

Originally Posted by Future_Sniper_

how much would something like this cost? Im imagining theres gonna be roughly 600-1000 bucks there in the next week. Thats alot of money for a server is it not?

Well, to give you an idea, if Tru dropped dead tomorrow, I could run the site for about 3-4 months with the current donations, and then I'd have to bust out my Visa again. That's still alot, because it's expensive to host a site this size.

I'm really amazed with how things have turned out, I had 0 expectations about these donations. Right now we've almost cleared the capital cost of starting the server (which was entirely out of my pocket), and now some will go towards upgrades (another 512MB of ram being added soon), as well as running costs, and there are more software upgrades I'd love to do (hawt auction mebbe?).

Sean and I and all the other mods have been doing this for almost 5 years, and we've never asked for anything. Websites don't run themselves, and everything you see when you log on is the result of so many hours I don't even want to think about it.

And I don't want to think about the money either. I'm not going to ask for subscription fees, or user fees. Whatever people can give, they give. You can donate a fat bag of nothing and the site will continue to run and be maintained for your use, for all I know for another 5 years.



To all the guys that have already donated, I can't thank you enough. You guys care about ASC as much as we do! I guarantee Sean is as pleased as I am. He didn't put any money in, but he's logged hundreds of hours over the years as well, and while we've had plenty of arguments over how to run things, we've both put alot of our time, blood, sweat and tears (he cries like a little girl) into ASC over the years. I get pretty blaze about it sometimes, but seeing guys come out to support what we do for you guys really helps.

So again, thank you guys.

-Miles

:xmas:

[Bravo One-Six]

Infernal, the server is not at someones home, it's a some server farm somewhere. Having stuff like that installed into one of our basements isn't feasible for what we're doing here.

[MMMiles!]

Originally Posted by infernal

I agree somewhat with what Future_Sniper said... and he has the right to express his opinion. So relax.

On another note if you paid over a grand for a server, you are mis-managing your money. A dual drive backup rack server on a linux platform will run you less than $700 shipped with PSU and you can get a battery backup for under $100. You're co-lo should provide most of this for you, so the server should be all you need (provided you have a co-lo). For that price, you are running just shy of a half a terrabyte on a 10mbit line.

Doesn't it seem kind of interesting to charge $40 for 250mb of webhosting with ftp access... espsecially if this site does run on a fast line (10mbit +)... with the amount of people that are contributing... you could see your hosting bills go through the roof.

For the person that said go reasearch, dedicated hosting is not that expensive. Burstable WiLan has come down alot over the past 24 months and is available at 5mb and 10mb burstable in your home for much less than t1 or greater. Most people that host via dedicated lines are running hundreds of other hosting contracts to make up for the costs, so its not a huge deal. It would be financial suicide and completely stupid to pay for a dedicated fiber line to run one single website. Instead, a more appropriate application of resources would be in the form of purchasing either dedicated or virtual rackspace from a someone like servermatrix. Your money is better spent there considering you have more than 14 mainframe connections routing your server.

Myself, I run 6 rack servers at q9 in calgary, so unfortunatly I actually know what I'm talking about. I do routing for 4,700 hotels all with 10mbit+ fiber connections worldwide.

Now I'm not saying I have anything against the donations... I feel they are great. I know the actual CODING of the site takes quite a bit of man hours. Hopefully enough gets raised that some really cool new features can be released, and we can start seing some forward moving development very soon.

I myself will probably contribute to the fund as I use this site quite a bit. Miles, you have done some great work on this site. Should you need any assistance in administration or coding the website, I would be glad to sponsor some of my time to your cause.

This site runs only 2 websites that support its existence financially. AirsoftCanada and Airsoft-Innovations.

I purchased dedicated hosting, meaning they buy and install the hardware, because I don't have time to go shopping for servers. Would I like to setup a colo? Yes. But I'm not a network administrator, this is just a hobby, I'm not going to change my life just to run this site. The server is located at Ezzi in NY, I don't know why anyone thinks I'm running fiber to my house. I've had to pay for some tech time at the DC, too, because things go wrong now and then.

I don't resell the webspace and I really don't intend to. I consider it a major undertaking to handle someone else's data, and I will not do it unless I feel 100% capable of maintaining the services at a level I would expect from a host (and I have pretty high expectations).

I don't pirate any software on this website. The cost of running ASC includes the cost of purchasing legal software over the last 4 years. That alone has been a fair sum, and even there people have donated licenses (Zeus helped us get started on Vbulletin).

I'm not going to value my time over the last 4 years, but we've gone through 4 complete revisions of the site, as well as dealing with all the community related issues. That's alot of typing and late nights. Coding time over 4 years? I don't even want to think about what it adds up to. I don't care either, it's what we donated towards the airsoft community in Canada. And I didn't do it alone, dozens of people have helped over the years, from the previous admins, to people helping out with all sorts of work, never mind the whole mod staff that spends amazing amount of hours cleaning things up around here.

I purchased a setup that would give me enough bandwidth to keep ASC going for quite awhile. For 4 years we bounced from shared hosting to shared hosting as we got bigger and bigger. I made a long term investment in the site, so the hosting has alot of growth potential. Ideally this server will keep ASC happy for another 2 years, at least, but I won't cross my fingers.

In a perfect world, I would be a professional site admin, and I would value shop all my hosting decisions. But that isn't the case, I'm just an airsofter with a hobbyist approach to computers. Thank Midgetspy for helping get me moving on the Linux server. I know more than when I started, but still basically 0, but somehow ASC manages to keep chugging along, with no ads, no user fees, no subscriptions.

[MMMiles!]

Originally Posted by Blackthorne

Depending on what chassis you are running I may be able to help out in the memory area...I can get Compaq memory in various flavour at low low prices (READ: FREE)

Unfortunately, with my setup, I don't have hardware control over the box, so I buy at their prices (which are actually very reasonable).