This is a technical note to myself so that I remember how I'm going to do it. I'll be adding a hidden user reference to art submissions, and each time art is saved, it checks to see if the external author field has been filled out. If there's something in that field and it matches the name of an OGA user, then I reference that user in the hidden field. Otherwise, I reference the submitter in that field.
In the user gallery view, I just need to filter on that field rather than submitter.
@MrBeast: That does include some extra money for hiring people to work on the site, commission more art, etc (even once my contract ends and I'm hopefully working on OGA full-time), although for particularly large endeavors (such as an outside site redesign, which would be in the tens of thousands) I might have to do a kickstarter.
@JasonWoof: I removed the $500 reward (since I doubt it'll be used anyway), and added a footnote to the advertisement goal.
@Buch: You're doing a lot for OGA already (as evidenced by the six pages of art on your user profile)! Thanks for all of your hard work. :)
@Sharm: There are a couple questions about your avatar reward. Can you hop on IRC today and send me a message so we can chat for a few minutes? If not, I can email you.
You already have my info and you know my intentions.
Haha, that sounds more ominous than it actually is. :)
Keeping up with answering questions is going to keep me pretty busy today, so it may turn out to be a day or three before I can get back to you. Thanks again for your help!
It should be noted that as long as I'm still doing my contract work (which could be many more months), anything over $2500 will go toward paying for art (probably a even a large portion of donations over $2000, honestly, but I don't want to guarantee that). The goal that I'm really shooting for at the moment is actually just $2000, which will allow me to work 20 hours a week on OGA. $5000 would be great, and I put that goal there because I don't want people to assume the campaign is over just because we got to $2000. The additional money can be put to use, as you said, by paying for art, while I'm not able to work the remaining hours.
As for the value of what I do compared to the value of a full-time artist, that's actually more difficult to quantify than what you're making it out to be. The site can hum along as it is with no improvements with just a couple days a month of total effort on my part. That being said, OGA isn't supposed to just be about people showing up at the site to download art. There are a lot of collaboration and community engagement features that we're missing out on right now just because there hasn't been time to code them. As for how much that will eventually be worth? I don't know. In the long run, it can make a huge difference.
Do you mind if I put that up as a reward on the official page? Just let me know the limit of how many you can reasonably do, along with the the latest date you can do them.
Part of the trouble with ads is performance and disk space. In order to give useful information to advertisers, I have to keep metrics, which means that I have to record every view of the ad along with every click on it. That way I can tell advertisers how many unique viewers have seen their ad, and what the click rate was.
Without running the ad, the homepage for people who aren't logged in is completely cached (it updates once every couple minutes), so it's very easy on the system. There's also the issue of database table sizes. When you're inserting hundreds of thousands of records a day, pretty soon the table gets huge and inserts start to slow down, which is one of the reasons advertisements are turned off right now. I could tune things better than the out-of-the-box Drupal module I'm using, but it's a lot easier on the site (and on our disk space) if we don't have them at all.
The other alternative is to go with an advrtising company and run their iframe, but then I don't get to screen the ads in advance for annoyances such as sounds or animation, or things like malware. Also, right now, OGA has no outside tracking cookies, which is really rare nowadays. When you visit here, Google Analytics doesn't know about it, Facebook doesn't know about it, Doubleclick doesn't know about it, etc. That's kind of a point of pride for me, so the whole idea of running outside ads is really unappealing.
Finally, and this is perhaps the most important reason I'd rather not run ads: The only people that I want to be beholden to are my users. If one company decided to buy up all my ad space, that would be huge, but then I'd likely start depending on that income, so that would put them in a position to pressure me to run OGA the way they want me to run it, rather than the way the users would like it run. I'm not comfortable with that.
No problem.
This is a technical note to myself so that I remember how I'm going to do it. I'll be adding a hidden user reference to art submissions, and each time art is saved, it checks to see if the external author field has been filled out. If there's something in that field and it matches the name of an OGA user, then I reference that user in the hidden field. Otherwise, I reference the submitter in that field.
In the user gallery view, I just need to filter on that field rather than submitter.
@MrBeast: That does include some extra money for hiring people to work on the site, commission more art, etc (even once my contract ends and I'm hopefully working on OGA full-time), although for particularly large endeavors (such as an outside site redesign, which would be in the tens of thousands) I might have to do a kickstarter.
@JasonWoof: I removed the $500 reward (since I doubt it'll be used anyway), and added a footnote to the advertisement goal.
@Buch: You're doing a lot for OGA already (as evidenced by the six pages of art on your user profile)! Thanks for all of your hard work. :)
@Sharm: There are a couple questions about your avatar reward. Can you hop on IRC today and send me a message so we can chat for a few minutes? If not, I can email you.
You already have my info and you know my intentions.
Haha, that sounds more ominous than it actually is. :)
Keeping up with answering questions is going to keep me pretty busy today, so it may turn out to be a day or three before I can get back to you. Thanks again for your help!
@Sharm: Wow, that's really nice to hear. If OGA is a good home for artists, then I'm doing something right. :)
@Warspawn: You're awesome, thanks! :)
It should be noted that as long as I'm still doing my contract work (which could be many more months), anything over $2500 will go toward paying for art (probably a even a large portion of donations over $2000, honestly, but I don't want to guarantee that). The goal that I'm really shooting for at the moment is actually just $2000, which will allow me to work 20 hours a week on OGA. $5000 would be great, and I put that goal there because I don't want people to assume the campaign is over just because we got to $2000. The additional money can be put to use, as you said, by paying for art, while I'm not able to work the remaining hours.
As for the value of what I do compared to the value of a full-time artist, that's actually more difficult to quantify than what you're making it out to be. The site can hum along as it is with no improvements with just a couple days a month of total effort on my part. That being said, OGA isn't supposed to just be about people showing up at the site to download art. There are a lot of collaboration and community engagement features that we're missing out on right now just because there hasn't been time to code them. As for how much that will eventually be worth? I don't know. In the long run, it can make a huge difference.
Ah, that's a really awesome idea. :)
Also, this gives me a couple of ideas for art rewards that I can offer myself.
Sharm, you're awesome :)
Do you mind if I put that up as a reward on the official page? Just let me know the limit of how many you can reasonably do, along with the the latest date you can do them.
Part of the trouble with ads is performance and disk space. In order to give useful information to advertisers, I have to keep metrics, which means that I have to record every view of the ad along with every click on it. That way I can tell advertisers how many unique viewers have seen their ad, and what the click rate was.
Without running the ad, the homepage for people who aren't logged in is completely cached (it updates once every couple minutes), so it's very easy on the system. There's also the issue of database table sizes. When you're inserting hundreds of thousands of records a day, pretty soon the table gets huge and inserts start to slow down, which is one of the reasons advertisements are turned off right now. I could tune things better than the out-of-the-box Drupal module I'm using, but it's a lot easier on the site (and on our disk space) if we don't have them at all.
The other alternative is to go with an advrtising company and run their iframe, but then I don't get to screen the ads in advance for annoyances such as sounds or animation, or things like malware. Also, right now, OGA has no outside tracking cookies, which is really rare nowadays. When you visit here, Google Analytics doesn't know about it, Facebook doesn't know about it, Doubleclick doesn't know about it, etc. That's kind of a point of pride for me, so the whole idea of running outside ads is really unappealing.
Finally, and this is perhaps the most important reason I'd rather not run ads: The only people that I want to be beholden to are my users. If one company decided to buy up all my ad space, that would be huge, but then I'd likely start depending on that income, so that would put them in a position to pressure me to run OGA the way they want me to run it, rather than the way the users would like it run. I'm not comfortable with that.
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