Having problems registering on Coin Return? Please email support@coin-return.org, and include your PA username and PIN.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
Posts
(A large company I once worked for named their conference rooms after Spielberg movies, for some reason. I think our little forum bot will probably be fine.)
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/charitable-contribution-deductions
It's hard to give a definitive answer, because a lot of our ongoing operating expenses depend on which tier we end up falling into with Xenforo's hosting package. Based on the PA traffic, we suspect we would fall into the $350/month tier, but if we see a decent enough drop off from PA traffic levels (which we could, even without a huge drop in users, just because of a lack of residual Penny Arcade traffic, etc), we might fall into the next tier down, at $150/month.
There are several other ongoing expenses, like domain registration, email services, Google workspace accounts, a few Xenforo paid add-ons, annual fees for tax filing and our annual report filing, and probably a good handful of stuff I'm not thinking of right now.
Basically, on the cheaper end, we could be funded for 6-7 years, but if we fall on the more expensive end, it's more like 3.5 years. But that's just with the one-time donations. We've also got a small, but growing monthly donation cache coming in. This is in the form of folks kicking in 3 to 10 dollars a month via Patreon, PayPal, or Ko-fi. We're currently at about $126 per month in monthly recurring donations, so if you also factor that in, it extends the expensive plan by another year or two, but if we remain on the cheaper end of the hosting plans it's getting dangerously close to indefinitely self-sustaining and would currently probably go for 15 years.
Of course, I think there's a good chance our traffic usage ends up pushing us to that higher priced tier, and we may eventually have to factor in some other additional costs for external data storage for image hosting, so there are a lot of moving parts here. But suffice it to say that we're probably good for several years no matter how that all shakes out, and if we end up seeing the monthly donations upped a bit more once folks are actually using the new forums (as several people have indicated to me that they plan to do), I think we'll be in a really good place where we won't be hurting for money for the foreseeable future and we'll, thankfully, never find ourselves backed into a corner that has us tempted to engage in--ugh--advertising.
(Edit: we'll, of course, be able to give a much more solid projection on this once we have a few months in place at Coin Return and can see our traffic numbers stabilized. Obviously we'll keep the community in the loop on this.)
thank you that was a very informative answer!
Zon's nickname is actually "major incident"
So, should we ask what you plan on doing that may require a lawyers intervention?
Or is there too much risk of self incrimination there?
PSN:Furlion
Yes, there has. I’ll let @Delzhand weigh in when he has time, but from what I gather the gist is that xenforo provides us image hosting which works great but is not priced super well, so replacing it with some kind of Amazon S3 backed external image hosting would be ideal, but isn’t natively supported with Xenforo cloud so it will take some dev work to build a custom integration. And like many things, I believe it’s somewhere on the list to at least investigate.
Steal the secret handshake of every group on Greek Row at the UCLA...
You sonofabitch I'm in.
Select the pistol, and then, select the horse post.
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
Steam ID
I've got a new idea for an avatar that takes Strawberry Shortcake in a bold new direction
Ooo, you can also have her doing some secret sorority handshakes!
MHWilds ID: JF9LL8L3
Or is the concern that whomever is hosting images pulls a photobucket?
You can absolutely upload your own images elsewhere if you like and embed them inline in posts. We're talking about the actual native image uploading when composing a post. Xenforo has that out of the box, but it uses their own data storage and the pricing on it isn't the greatest.
mom said it's my turn with the png, you can use the third party jpg controller
Absolutely true, to give an indication:
If it turns out we need a small forum, we'll fall into the 100$ a month tier, this will give us 100GB of storage (this is DB + images, but the database will be peanuts, like... "a GB a year" orders of magnitude.) 90Gb+ of images is an "Ok" but not overly generous amount.
If we fall into the "About the size of Current PA" we would probably fall into their largest non-enterprise plan at $250 a month, giving us 240GB.. again, that's you know.. a good amount of images, so don't ever feel like you can't use the functionality, but it's not "the sky is the limit"
Anything bigger then that, we have to either contact them and get a bespoke deal, or make a custom plugin to use a cloud provider (such as AWS or Azure) to serve as an image dumping zone. The first one might, or might not be expensive, the second one also costs a bit of money, and it requires us to make custom code to do Content-Delivery off the images off-site. It is a solved problem, but there might be some fancy programming required.
One of the monthly costs that we initialy didn't count on was e-mail.
XenForo's email "solution" is to just let the server itself send mails via the Unix Mail deamon. Anyone who knows even a bit about email services knows that this is a terrible idea if you send a decent amount of mail, as getting blacklisted as "some random AWS server that send mails and got marked as spam" is incredibly easy to have happen to you, and getting your random server in good standing again is hard.
Also, unless this was fixed, it would send it as "XenForo_Custom_Server_Dublin_04_AWS" or something like that, and not "Coin Return" and that's.. just amateur hour. (this might have been a misconfiguration)
So we're using an intermediary (In this case Mailgun, but there are others such as Sendgrid/MailChimp)
Today we're on the free tier of 100 emails a day, but we'll blow through that in no-time once registration proper opens, so count on that being around 35$ a month (might be a bit more, but you can directly buy more email without going up a tier)
That'll get us 50.000 emails a month wich is, if we have 2.5k members, about 1 mail per member every other day.
That sounds like a lot, but DM's and Reports and such can easily generate a decent amount of mail, also, 2FA via E-mail is an option, and that would generate an email for every login.
Another recurring cost is the google workspace, where we have custom email addresses for the transition team, and a shared google workspace where all our official documentation (and unofficial such as the fundraise documents, etc...) are stored, so that they're always available to everyone in the team should they be needed, and easily transferable if the board changes.
Domain registration is peanuts.. like, a tenner a year.
There's a few other yearly recurring costs like paying to have the delaware corporation be homed at an agent, who provides a PO box and does some paperwork and such.
Our bank account is free as long as we have enough money in it, I think.
If we had gone for Neo-Arcadia as our name, we could've just mass registered at the existing Neo Arcadia Forums (A French arcade enthuisiasts site) and just confused all the existing people by refusing to elaborate.
Edit:
To elaborate on this: I wouldn't worry about Disk Space just yet. It is incredibly convenient to just upload the images the same way as PA forums does, and we DO have adequate disk space. And if it ever becomes a problem, we'll face it when we get there. We might even work out something where threads older then 2 years have their images automatically archived offsite with a link, or whatever.
I would really not worry about this too much right now.
That actually raises a question for me, with it being a new forum, will current workplace blacklists catch it? Would be a nice little bonus for those who use work Internet to still be able to browse the forums. At least until we get mega huge famous which i am sure will happen.
PSN:Furlion