(also posted at http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=20737&p=290814#p290814 )
All, As you may be aware, we have been having trouble finding adequate hosting for all the services we want to offer to our user community. In particular, the resources to run our forums have been difficult to come by, and the resources to run the multiplayer server have been even more difficult. Rather than continuing to rely on scrapping together server resources from various donors who have varying quality of service, I think that the Wesnoth community is robust enough now for us to pay for a quality service. According to our estimates, with the rate our user community is growing, we will hit a wall by the end of the year. We would like to move onto better hosting now, but in any case we want to have contingencies ready so we can do something by the end of the year. Having our own infrastructure will also hopefully allow us to do many more cool things that we haven't previously been able to do. We hope, for instance, to be able to integrate the forums with wesnothd, such that registering on the forums will automatically register your name on wesnothd, and vice-versa. Then, you could also choose to record your stats at stats.wesnoth.org, so if your stats are recorded, anyone could go and look up your username, and see which campaigns you've played, and how you did in them! As such, I am asking for the Wesnoth community to contribute money toward paying for server hosting. We estimate it will cost about $1500 to $2000 annually to pay for hosting. We are hoping to raise at least $500 initially, and then will see if donations are adequate to cover our costs, or if advertising will also be necessary. (Don't worry, we will make sure that any advertising we do will be as unintrusive as possible, and will offer support to anyone who wants to turn it off). If you would like to contribute money to this, please send me funds using PayPal. You can send to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- note that funds sent will be considered a personal gift to me. If anyone has any questions or concerns, please let me know of them. Thanks! David _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
