This means that we will at least break even on fundraising for the year! Anything more will go into to the operations buffer! Thank you all so much!
Not to rain on the victory parade, but just so you know the official total is the one above the forum which updates every 15 minutes. That is what we have raised with the Paypal fees figured in. That has us at $2823.45, leaving us $275.55 to go.
As a thank you to the members for their support I am going to randomly pick 5 members for free Gold subscriptions (1 year, $240 value) on Jan 1st 2018. You do not have to be a donor or a current subscriber to have a chance to receive one, just be an active registered member on the forums (Registered and made posts in the month of December 2017).
Merry Christmas!
Mechanism of the drawingEach post made in December is an entry. On Jan 1st at 12:00:00am CST, I will do a SQL dump of all posts in the month of December. I will exclude all Deleted messages, and I will exclude the staff forums. Staff are otherwise eligible to win for their public posts.
I will then generate 5 random numbers between 1 and the total number of posts in question. The posts which match those numbers will win a free gold account, provided they are still a registered member, and have not already won one.
I have seen this work in another situation and it works very well, and it's also very fair. Someone with even 1 post can win.
If we feel that someone is inflating their post counts specifically for this (IE Making junk posts), we reserve the right to sanction the member in question.
How some of it was spent.When paid myself what I had been shorted from last month, I went ahead and bought the items I need to re-purpose the old server into my new desktop PC. This results in a massive upgrade for me: +1ghz processor speed, an additional 4 CPU cores, and 16 GB of ram when compared to my old system.
I purchased a larger hard drive, and plan on reusing the 960gb SSD from the old server. I also purchased two hotswappable drive mounting bays one for ssd's and one for the new hard drive. With the drives from my old pc and the new drive, I should end up with around 14tb of storage capacity.
I was constantly running out of space on the 240gb SSD I had in my old system, so the upgrade I gain reusing from the one from the old server is massively appreciated!
Backing up this website is very space intensive
My currently 5 year old desktop pc was also used for running the chat bot; Development environment (web, graphic, and application design), coordinating with staff and members, and personal entertainment. I spend more time on the PC than I spend away from it. So believe me when I say I appreciate it!
