The donation drive to raise money to purchase additional hardware for Dumpshock.com is now underway!

If you would like to donate via Paypal, please visit Dumpshock.com and click on the "Make a Donation" button at the bottom of the sidebar. If you would prefer to mail a check, please contact us at donations@dumpshock.com. Every little bit helps, and there is no minimum donation. If you can afford to help out, we'd really appreciate it, but it's completely voluntary and we understand that not everyone can or wants to donate.

Background: As many of you know, the server which originally hosted Dumpshock.com went down in December of last year. Since then, we've moved some of the sites that were on the original server to our newer server. As a consequence of these moves, we've put considerably more load on the remaining server. We've reached the point now where we would either be forced to take a very long outage to bring down the remaining server and rebuild it, or purchase a new server.

With this in mind, we decided to go the latter route and purchase an additional server for Dumpshock.com. We estimate the cost of a new server to be in the range of $1300-1500 US to purchase a server sufficiently powerful enough that we should not have to upgrade the system for a long time.

I will be posting periodic updates to this thread as we near our goal. Thanks to everyone for their support over the years.

I got a question?

There are 5774 registered members on this site so seeing as they pay for the internet (seeing as free internet is somethings of a rareity nowadays) just how many DSer's can't afford a buck?

I mean even if Paypal takes 10% that leaves 90 cents on the dollar to DS take 90 cents and multiply by 5774 registered members and you get 5196.60.

Now 1300 to 1500 is a good price but heck at 3 grand a server they could almost buy 2 and a 3 grand server should be more than enough power and processing ability.

Drop to 2 grand they could almost buy 3 servers or 2 and use left over money for bandwidth and maybe a nice dinner out for the people (I. E. Adam and who ever else sorry Adam is the only one I know of) and they can take their significant others along as well cause we DSer's take up so much of their time.

Just a thought I had oh and yes I'll donate soon as I can payday coming up in a couple of days.

But hey everyone just think about it 1 Dollar is not alot compared to what we all pay for internet service heck I pay 44.95 a month for mine.

Oh yeah by the way if you don't have a Paypal accout they deposit money into your bank accout when you sign up so they know the got it right.

Amazeingly enough it is between 50 cents and 1 dollar so if you don't have an account with Paypal guess what you won't even have to send the whole dollar yourself lol. (too bad they don't still do 5 dollars for referals)

That's assuming that those 5774 users are all still active on the site, and we know that they're not -- whether they've left because they don't play Shadowrun anymore, don't like the way the boards are run, simply don't have the time anymore, have changed usernames, etc.

For most donation drives and anything that requires the user to contribute money and/or time to improve a service, I typically assume that 1 in 100 active users will participate.

I'd love to be proved wrong.

And, FWIW, I have no desire to raise enough money to "skim" some for us -- we just want to be able to pay our costs and keep serving up millions of page hits a month without interruption.

I'd love for you guys to be proved wrong myself.

By the by: Are you guys going to be doing what you did with the previous donation run (adding donators to the group "Dumpshocked")? I think that might provide a little bit of incentive (not that any of us are title elitists, no way ).

Oh, and, donated! Thanks for the great services.

Well you have a good point there Adam although the 5774 number I came up with is for the registered members.

Sammie the most recent person to sign up is member 7103 so I was thinking that the 5774 were the active members.

Thus leaveing 1324 members who are no longer active for what ever reason.

But then again I'm no genius when it comes to web sites and the people who visit them lol.

But hey I'll cover my dollars worth as well some dollars for other people just to help out.

Have you considered hiring a host, rather than hosting the servers yourselves? Depending on your monthly bandwidth totals, it might be considerably cheaper (say, $100-300/year). Check out GoDaddy.com, or Lunarpages.com (disclaimer: GoDaddy is my site's registrar, and Lunarpages is my host).

For example, the Deluxe plan at GoDaddy ($9.95/mo) gives you 2GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth a month. That price also covers 500 email accounts, PHP scripting, and up to 10 MySQL databases. If you agree to a yearly contract, they'll knock off another 20%, bringing it down to $7.96/mo. Throw in your yearly domain registration fee, and you're looking at just over $100 a year.

Oh, well.... just my 2 cents....

I get paid next week, and even a poor college student like myself can spare to send a couple bucks to such a worthy cause.

Idea:
Is there anyway that you can post a counter dispalying how much money has been collected thus far. I've participated in several fund raising drives during my campus career and I've noticed that seeing a symbol of progress is often a great motivator for potential donors.

Just my 2

Keep up the great work

Good idea, Bandit, I put up a little box on the homepage that shows the current fund raiser status with a little meter that fills up as people donate. This is not completely dynamic, I have to update the amount that has been donated every time someone donates, so don't be discouraged if it takes a little while for your donation to appear.

well if half those people are still active on the site you should have your server in no time. Donating now...

Ditto

Man... I just knew that some day, somehow, I'd be forced into getting a Paypal account.

Bah, I just made my bank write a check. Fark paypal

Just donated, hope you reach your target soon.

Tossed in $5 =)

13 donations so far, totalling $422.33. We're almost 1/3 of the way there, and there area few folks who I'm waiting to get checks from, so we're probably a little further along than that even. Thanks for the support to everyone that has helped so far, we really appreciate it.

I did my part last night. Got keep my favorite board alive.

Thanks for hosting my site, guys. Seeing as how I'm not perpetually broke any more, I'm glad I could (finally) help out.

Donation sent! I'm all for supporting the 'Shock!

We do have a little "thank you" for forum members who donate, but we haven't advertised it. I guess since we did the same thing last time, the cat's out of the bag anyway.

Forum members who donate will be added to the "Dumpshocked" group instead of the default "Members" group and will be granted a short custom title. If you look at some of the people above who have donated you'll see that some of them have already been setup. It's just a cosmetic thing, but we like being able to publically thank people who have helped out.

If you've donated and I haven't set you up in the Dumpshocked group and set your custom title for you, please let me know via PM and I'll straighten it out.

Likewise kicked in a bit of change.

Fired off a few ¥¥¥ for ya. Figure thanks to DS I go to GenCon on the cheap, I can share the wealth.

I donated

Though I have some questions (concerning the special title):

How do you know it was me? If you go by email, I use a different one for PayPal.

Should I post the title here or should I email/PM it and if the last one, then who should I contact?

I'm waiting until I get my meal check on friday and then I'm just gonna add a little "pay to the order of" action and send it off.

Soon

Got the mail and replied. Thanks.

We're in the home stretch, the donation meter on the homepage has changed color to yellow as of the last donation, only $436 to go!

Current total: $1064.30

Thanks to everyone who has donated so far, it's much appreciated. I'm working on finalizing the specifications of the server we're going to purchase so that we can get it ordered as soon as the drive is complete.

Ok finally did my part a few minutes ago like I said I would.

Tossed ya 21.40 so hopefully you get the 20.00 I wanted to give ya and paypal would still get their use our system money they want lol.

Anyway hope it is enough glad I could help.

Oh and Neuron Basher once again thanks for the assist with my requests.

Donated $5. Good luck!

*click* Done.

Finally did like I said I would but did paypal rather than a check, so threw a little extra on top to make sure paypal doesn't cut in too much.

And with Frosty's donation, we're almost there.. Only $179.50 until we reach our goal. Thanks again to all of the benefactors who have helped make this drive a success. Your support is very much appreciated -- I anticipate ordering the new server this week.

making one now, it's only gonna be 5 or 6 bucks but seeing as how i'm on these site all day practically every day, i figure its the least i can do (well, actually right now it's the most i can)

edit and it's done

I know I am not around much anymore, but if I added up all the hours I have spent on DSF it would rival tv. And I pay 60 bucks a month for cable, the least I can do is give you guys ten dollars.

I have always felt that you guys do a great service to the SR community, you give us geeks a place to hang out and play, or talk about SR. Thank you.

/donate


-Shadow

I've always felt like Dumpshock was the "Shadowland BBS" of RL

How does the fund stand at the moment?

Current total is $1380.29 according to the homepage, which should be up to date. I've been doing a pretty good job getitng it updated as people donate. We're very close to reaching our goal.

sweet, glad to hear that

Donated.

Almost there

Donated, or will in the next 15 seconds.

We're getting there, though donations have slowed way down in the past few days. Only about $85 before I officially close the donation drive and order the new server.

Finally managed to get Paypal back up and running for me, so chucked in twenty bucks for my dad and I... hope that helps.

The donation drive is officially completed! Thanks to everyone for the donations, we've reached (and slightly exceeded) our $1500.00 goal, so it's time to go shopping for the new server.

I'll post a note on the server specs once it's ordered, since I know some of you are curious.

Thanks again for all your support, the response to the donation drive has been great and we really appreciate it.

Damn. I must have been the last one contributing. When I checked back right after placing my donation the link to paypal was gone.

Congratulations on a successfull run till next time see ya later chummer.

Everyone who donated -- thank you very much. Your continued support is amazing, and we're very thankful for it.

No, thank you for providing all of this free of charge.

Server has been ordered. For the curious:

Dell SC1425, 1U chassis
2 x Intel Xeon 2.8GHz
2GB DDR2 RAM
1 x 160GB SATA 7200RPM HDD
3 year Dell Warranty

And I'll be ordering a second 160GB HDD for redundancy when the server arrives and I can verify the model of drive in it for matching purposes. I didn't want to waste donation money on an overpriced drive from Dell, though I did get the extended warranty which I usually avoid. I'd rather get the extended warranty than have to do another donation drive if the server fails in a couple of years.

Dell was running a deal, $200 off the list price of the server and they throw in a 2nd processor for free. I couldn't beat this deal anywhere, even on cheap generic hardware.

This server should easily handle our needs for years to come.

Hey, great, that has almost enough juice to run the Sims 2.