Help Keep VFDC Running

Myke, open donations mabye..? I am sure many people will be more then willing to help this site going on

Our national FG pages works like that, but our traffic and costs are significantly lower. But that is the number of readers as well

 

Open donations sounds good but of course it's success depends on how many people are willing to participate on it. Fewer people means more costs for the rest. 50 people paying only 2€ per month would nail the full cost already. I haven't been very active with VF or VFDC lately but I certainly wouldn't want to see it gone.

 

Maybe time to think the unthinkable, and jettison large portions of the archive? You've got thousands of threads and posts still on here going back over a decade, many from members who no longer interact, and probably never will again. I notice even some of the older really heated flames are still being stored intact. Perhaps there could be a thread, nominating or collating all the really cool old threads (for example, the local scene one) and anything which is considered really important or massively nostalgic, then just ditch the rest.

Since FS appeared, I try and look on here frequently, and frankly, it's quite a small board, with not that much activity. I don't quite get why it costs so much to maintain each month, with so little traffic. Do you have to pay to licence or rent the software or is it a one-off, and could a cheaper option be explored? Just the combos and framelists, some news articles, and a few off-topic threads, the actual data size must be quite small. Perhaps someone with their own webspace could host it. The integrated chat feature here is nice, but if that takes up bandwidth, maybe just revert to IRC like before, which people can access through browsers anyhow these days.

If SEGA themselves still support large tournaments in the West, and throw big money at them, could they not intervene here with some financial stimulus? Maybe VFDC could just affiliate or piggyback onto one of their official forums or blogs. What we may lose in autonomy, we could at least gain in longevity.

 

How does it sound trying to get ads from Sega itself, Madcatz (and other peripherals company), Twitch (with all the stream that vfdc's members do) etc.

In case of donations count me in (maybe we can even do a mix of ads + donations).

 

A paypal button to donate sounds good to me. 1$ for each user will cover tons of years for the forum. Also if you reach your goal sooner you may always keep the button up to gather something more for the next year.
If not 1$ even 50 cents will do the job. We may be one of the smallest communities compared to some others but on this forums we have a lot of people willing to pay I think.
so myke:

 

I would donate.

 

Myke is that $100 a month or a year? Either way I would donate. Lets get a headcount so we have an idea what can be accomplished.

 

I asked already, it is per month

 

I'll pledge $50 USD right now. This doesn't mean ever or for the year, but it'll be my starting donation to get the ball rolling. Afterward, I think I'll be happy doing smaller seasonal donations but I wanted to pledge up front

I also encourage continuing to pursue more sources of revenue as you already are in addition to donations. I think donations are awesome but I imagine we've dipped below a critical mass until some crazy VF6 announcement and while donations will help a lot, sustainability will be hard.

And personally, I hope the archive is kept, probably because of how much VFDC means to me.

 

What does this mean, BTW?

 

I think this: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1706015#n2

This is not my area, I was just curious. I think this is specific to AdSense Games

 

A tournament could help once a month. Have a 5 dollar or so entry fee and the money can go to vfdc a little to the winner of the tournament just to motivate people to play and to keep this site going.

 

I was wondering what the violations are? The only thing I can think is the art thread

 

Could be copyright concerns in the music thread, or that random links one. Some of the older threads do still contain all sorts of violent clashes between aggrieved parties, especially the FS 'bad games' one in the first few weeks. Maybe they leave that stuff in place to act as a tragi-comic reminder to how serious some people take their VF prowess? There also seems to be a huge influx of spambots constantly creating bizarre threads each day. I was wondering if some of the IT proficient people who've either been kicked off here, or burnt their bridges, could be behind these constant cyber assaults?
Any overtly aggressive status updates usually get zapped pretty quick by the team, but if AdSense frowns upon YT or even imgur links, then we'd have to all have a statement of clarification from the leadership on this matter, so users don't unintentionally commit breaches.

 

Pretty sure linking to YT violates nothing, unless Google is fucking stupid, so it's not the music thread, most likely it's the art thread and any other with lots of hotlinked images, plus peoples' random links in their status updates and all that.

Also putting up ads won't probably help nothing since I, for one and I think others too, use AdBlock and I, sorry to say, will not disable it for this site nor any other (Fuck you very much EventHubs), and if there were some in the past then I guess you can blame me for the site running out of money. 100 US a month doesn't really sound a lot, but I can understand that the incentive for paying it out of your own pocket every month isn't very inviting no matter how much you like VF or the site, so I hope you find some solution in keeping the site afloat even though I don't come here that often these days, but it sure would be a damn shame to lose +10 years of western VF knowledge.

 

My guess is it means those "watch XXX live!" spam threads that VFDC is flawed with 24/7 lately

 

No, don't start getting rid of anything. Start with donations, I'm in as long as it is thru PayPal which I assume it will be. Seriously go head and sign me up, I Love This Site!!!