I think that the funding goal of $2000/month is a little extreme. At that rate, it would be a second job for you, and that would be great I suppose, but as it is this site is more or less community-run.
You should check the feedback forum and read the backlog of bug reports and feature requests to see what all is needed, code-wise. To some extent, this site is able to run on its own, but frankly it's slow and buggy and there are a lot of things that people would like that I just don't have time to implement in my spare time.
If the cost is so great, I would recommend finding a way to reduce it.
The cost of letting the site "run itself" (into the ground) on its own is just the cost of the server. It needs a hefty box, and there's no reducing that. As for the rest of the cost, that funding is meant to take the place of the money I would receive from spending those hours on my regular contract work. I have a house, I have a wife and baby daughter, and I have bills to pay, and my asking price for those hours is already significantly less than what a lead Drupal developer/administrator for a medium to large site would be paid out in the work force. My wife is incredibly supportive of this project; she has a regular job and makes significantly more money than I do, and she's aware that I have the job skills necessary to make as much as she does, yet she has never complained that I'm going to be working for less money than I could be. On the other hand, if I suddenly cut my hours in half without some kind of way to fund that, we'd have trouble making our mortgage.
I get the feeling that you're under the impression that I'll be making more money than I am right now if the funding for OGA goes through, but I need to be clear about this: this isn't supplementary income, it's replacement income. I don't come out of this any richer; all I get from it is time to work on OGA without losing money every hour I spend not doing my hourly contract work.
Recruiting some quality volunteer site admins might be a solution.
I've already got a lot of people helping out, but here's the problem: Volunteers are volunteers. I can't afford to pay them, and often times volunteers discover that the work involved in maintaining the site is actually a lot more extensive than they thought it was. There are a number of administrators who can devote some time to helping out when they see spam, or art that needs to be edited in some way, or licensing issues, etc. On the other hand, really doing major work (running contests, curating art, etc) is a huge time commitment, and thus far no volunteer has been able to keep it up, and since I'm not paying them, it's not my place to force the issue. Given my experience running this site for the past 5 years, I can tell you that "just find some volunteers" is highly unrealistic, and it would be incredibly unfair of me to place those kinds of demands on my admins, who are willing to spend their time helping to run the site for free.
In conclusion, I'm sorry if I'm coming off as a little irritated. While it's true that OpenGameArt would be nothing without all of the incredible contributions from the community, I would like to believe that by running OGA I'm providing more than zero value to the FOSS and Indie gaming communities.
For those who already have a recurring payment with Paypal, etc., would you rather we transfered it to this Patreon thing?
Only if you don't find it troublesome to do. I'm wouldn't call people a bunch of mindless sheep, but certainly more donations result in more publicity, so there's definitely a feedback effect. :)
We get this one a lot. Unfortunately, fixing it will necessitate rewriting the download counting code from scratch. Until a couple of days ago, I was using a contributed Drupal module that had this bug, and also wasn't particularly optimized for large sites. Since it was too much of a performance hit, I've turned it off for now.
See the forum post about that. It was one of the things responsible for the recent slowness. When time allows, I'll write some custom code to do it, but the code that does it right now just isn't made to run on a site the size of OGA.
Just woke up. :)
Bertram, Guarav, Quilmos, and GunCheloc, I really appreciate your help. :)
@Guarav: No need to sign up for a new account. You've got the OGA Supporter medal now. :)
Thanks!
I think that the funding goal of $2000/month is a little extreme. At that rate, it would be a second job for you, and that would be great I suppose, but as it is this site is more or less community-run.
You should check the feedback forum and read the backlog of bug reports and feature requests to see what all is needed, code-wise. To some extent, this site is able to run on its own, but frankly it's slow and buggy and there are a lot of things that people would like that I just don't have time to implement in my spare time.
If the cost is so great, I would recommend finding a way to reduce it.
The cost of letting the site "run itself" (into the ground) on its own is just the cost of the server. It needs a hefty box, and there's no reducing that. As for the rest of the cost, that funding is meant to take the place of the money I would receive from spending those hours on my regular contract work. I have a house, I have a wife and baby daughter, and I have bills to pay, and my asking price for those hours is already significantly less than what a lead Drupal developer/administrator for a medium to large site would be paid out in the work force. My wife is incredibly supportive of this project; she has a regular job and makes significantly more money than I do, and she's aware that I have the job skills necessary to make as much as she does, yet she has never complained that I'm going to be working for less money than I could be. On the other hand, if I suddenly cut my hours in half without some kind of way to fund that, we'd have trouble making our mortgage.
I get the feeling that you're under the impression that I'll be making more money than I am right now if the funding for OGA goes through, but I need to be clear about this: this isn't supplementary income, it's replacement income. I don't come out of this any richer; all I get from it is time to work on OGA without losing money every hour I spend not doing my hourly contract work.
Recruiting some quality volunteer site admins might be a solution.
I've already got a lot of people helping out, but here's the problem: Volunteers are volunteers. I can't afford to pay them, and often times volunteers discover that the work involved in maintaining the site is actually a lot more extensive than they thought it was. There are a number of administrators who can devote some time to helping out when they see spam, or art that needs to be edited in some way, or licensing issues, etc. On the other hand, really doing major work (running contests, curating art, etc) is a huge time commitment, and thus far no volunteer has been able to keep it up, and since I'm not paying them, it's not my place to force the issue. Given my experience running this site for the past 5 years, I can tell you that "just find some volunteers" is highly unrealistic, and it would be incredibly unfair of me to place those kinds of demands on my admins, who are willing to spend their time helping to run the site for free.
In conclusion, I'm sorry if I'm coming off as a little irritated. While it's true that OpenGameArt would be nothing without all of the incredible contributions from the community, I would like to believe that by running OGA I'm providing more than zero value to the FOSS and Indie gaming communities.
For those who already have a recurring payment with Paypal, etc., would you rather we transfered it to this Patreon thing?
Only if you don't find it troublesome to do. I'm wouldn't call people a bunch of mindless sheep, but certainly more donations result in more publicity, so there's definitely a feedback effect. :)
Understandable. :)
We've got a paypal donate page here that has my paypal address on it:
http://opengameart.org/donate
Thanks for your support! :)
Having bought a house about a year ago, I know exactly how that goes. :)
Once the FSF and/or Debian Legal review and approve them, yes.
We get this one a lot. Unfortunately, fixing it will necessitate rewriting the download counting code from scratch. Until a couple of days ago, I was using a contributed Drupal module that had this bug, and also wasn't particularly optimized for large sites. Since it was too much of a performance hit, I've turned it off for now.
This is awesome. :)
Note that for ease of use, I clipped out the intro and the looping portion of the song and uploaded them separately.
They seem fairly accurate to me. I'm logged in bsaically all the time, though. If you're not logged in, you get a cached page.
See the forum post about that. It was one of the things responsible for the recent slowness. When time allows, I'll write some custom code to do it, but the code that does it right now just isn't made to run on a site the size of OGA.
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