Site Downtime (May 2016)

[Oman]

Yes we've definite made it that way.

[BROseidon]

BANNER ADS

[zakk]

I found the donate link here after searching both the forum and the wiki:

http://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?tit ... _Annoyance

[vonflare]

put it in your sig

[Ircher]

BANNER ADS

NO WAY!!!!

[esuriospiritus]

unobtrusive, static banner ads would be fine and I would disable adblock here for that.

[animorpherv1]

I don't use adblock anyways and would be fine with it.

[SleepyKrew]

p sure mith has said before that he really doesn't want banner ads

[InflatablePie]

banner ads?

I don't even know 'er ads

[TheShadow]

Well if we do everything I said in 35 we could still have another crash like this, it'd just help minimize the pandemonium. Under our current hosting situation it's not really feasible to prevent(though we've done pretty well so far). Higher fault tolerance would be a lot more achievable if we were hosted somewhere like AWS since we can spin up and shut down machines as needed and more easily create redundancy. If one of your machines crashes you can just start it back up yourself, or kill it completely and set up a new one without having to wait on anyone. I just need to get around to pricing it out to see if it's something we can afford.

From what little I know, AWS would definitely be the way to go if we can afford it.

Which I don't think would be much of a problem if the fact that it's possible to donate towards server costs was a bit more obvious.
Not meaning it has to be an announcement or anything, but maybe a stickied post in the discussion forums.

[Huntress]

but maybe a stickied post in the discussion forums.

There's a stickied thread in the News forum.
http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5191

Two in fact:
http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=62854

[zakk]

i was part of a forum before that had banner ads at the bottom of the forum, and there was one day per year where we all clicked the banner ads mercilessly to drive up the payments the site would get ... or whenever we were bored we would click it and close the window that popped up

because clickthroughs drive way more money to the host site than mere impressions.

[Psyche]

but maybe a stickied post in the discussion forums.

There's a stickied thread in the News forum.
http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5191

Two in fact:
http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=62854

no one goes there though
it's why most news are conveyed by global announcements

[zoraster]

If I were trying to monetize the site, I don't think Ads would be the way I'd go. I'd probably add recurring "supporter" memberships that come with small benefits and a banner under a user's name. I think small recurring payments tend to be more helpful to the site than fairly large infrequent donations, and recognizing those who support the site is a nice way to thank people who give.

But to be clear that's not my call at all, and I don't really have insight into whether that's necessary.

This doesn't seem to me to be a case of us not paying enough, honestly.

[Equinox]

If I'm remembering correctly, the Donations page used to be more visible due to mith posting financial statements periodically. He hasn't had the time to do that recently, so the idea that the site needs money to run has fallen by the wayside somewhat.

A relatively easy(?) fix would be to fix a "Donate" link in the header, next to "Search."

[Cabd]

I'd probably add recurring "supporter" memberships that come with small benefits and a banner under a user's name.

Reddit gold style.

[Psyche]

i find that tacky but i know that it works

[Kublai Khan]

[float=][/float]

If I were trying to monetize the site, I don't think Ads would be the way I'd go. I'd probably add recurring "supporter" memberships that come with small benefits and a banner under a user's name. I think small recurring payments tend to be more helpful to the site than fairly large infrequent donations, and recognizing those who support the site is a nice way to thank people who give.

But to be clear that's not my call at all, and I don't really have insight into whether that's necessary.

This doesn't seem to me to be a case of us not paying enough, honestly.

Pay to lynch. Votes to lynch are worth more based on donations.

[Psyche]

that's...a mechanic

[zoraster]

i find that tacky but i know that it works

Sure it's a little tacky. But I don't think it's less tacky than ads.

[Oman]

If I were trying to monetize the site, I don't think Ads would be the way I'd go. I'd probably add recurring "supporter" memberships that come with small benefits and a banner under a user's name. I think small recurring payments tend to be more helpful to the site than fairly large infrequent donations, and recognizing those who support the site is a nice way to thank people who give.

But to be clear that's not my call at all, and I don't really have insight into whether that's necessary.

This doesn't seem to me to be a case of us not paying enough, honestly.

In the past he's said that he didn't want to do those sorts of things. Of course, with server load and the bub and real world, the morals may have to take a back seat for a while. We'll see.

[zoraster]

Yeah, we've discussed it before. I don't know if we'll ever see it, but if we need to monetize (he has a wife and kids now after all), that'd be the way I'd recommend doing it. On the plus side, if we had some excess we could use it for small ad campaigns and the like, which I've experimented with but didn't want to spend a ton of money doing.

[Katsuki]

Pay to lynch is the way to go!

Also option to pay mod to not get lynched.

[Radical Rat]

Perhaps users could purchase ad space on the site for their upcoming games.

Potential to solve server reliability and speed up the queues?

[Cabd]

Zor can we split this off to a seperate thread? Since global announcements don't work properly with the "unread posts" feature; and this would probably give it (the issue at hand, not the unread posts thing) more visibility.