Weight Gaming Patreon Fundraiser

Forum News
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Weight Gaming Patreon Drive

UPDATE 2/15: GOAL: $2491/$2400 ($70 from 2/10) | 2/3 Consecutive Months Funded

Donate on our Patreon and click here to read the full post below
!!! IMPORTANT NOTE: NO DONATIONS OVER $250/MONTH !!!
https://www.patreon.com/weightgaming

Overview of the Fundraiser

For those of you who have not read my Future of Weight Gaming post, due to IRL changes and continuing layoffs at my work I can not afford to continue running the forums as out of pocket as I have been. Due to that I have announced that we are going to be forcing projects off of the forums and onto the wiki to give me the flexibility to reallocate my limited resources and in a worse case scenario of loosing my job, put the site into a bit of a standby mode until I get back to a more stable position.

@Keyfarer and a few other devs convince me to give the community a chance to help out before I go forward with it, so I took the week to look over our expenses and try to calculate a realistic worse case monthly burn for next year so I can set a realistic goal. That being said I can not keep downplaying the costs like I have in the past.

After I ran all the numbers I came to an estimated burn of $2357.86/month so with that in mind I decided to set the goal at $2400/month even. So with that in mind here is a quick outline on how this is going to work:

  1. We are still going to be locking down the projects category on 1/1. This is to give @Krodmandoon and I some breathing room to bring on more moderators and work out or moderation plan for if the community meets this goal

    • It should be noted, that if the community meets the goal before the 6 month deadline and we are done with the moderation setup I will reopen the Projects Category ahead of schedule.

  2. Our Patreon must reach at least $2400/month and stay there for 3 consecutive months

  3. No one can donate more then $250/month. Any that do will have their donation refunded

  4. This goal must be met before 7/1/2026

  5. If we reach $2400/month but the 3 month period will go past the planed archiving date for the projects category, I will extend the deadline appropriately

I do really hope to see this workout. I would much prefer if I could keep the projects category open, especially since I don’t think I will really be able to run the main site full open for the foreseeable future. This may not help much with my burnout though, but I think the stress of having to also financially support will be a big load off of my shoulders.

I will try to update the goals at the top of this post weekly to try to keep everyone up to day. I left the per month metric visible on the Patreon About page for more up to date info. Just keep in mind that the per month metric there doesn’t take into account something like credit card declines so the numbers I report here and the ones there may drift at times.

And while it is not much I have installed some tools to help promote the patreon and add patreons into groups automatically if their WG and Patreon account are using the same email. So expect to see some adverts for our patreon in topics and any one who Patreoned us and was added to the patreon group ads will no longer display at the top and bottom of the page for you all.

Break Down of the Estimated Monthly Expenses

Before we go into the details there are a few things to note quick:

  • With discretion being the better part of valor I listed my most pessimistic estimate for the main site. I have a few tricks I am going to try to see if I can cut the monthly cost down, but you just don’t know what you can and can not do until you try it. And on top of that bandwidth estimates are always a shot in the dark until you have data so it could end up under or way over my estimations. Due to that, I wanted to make sure I was not caught with my pants down if things turned out more on the expensive side.
  • This estimate contains deferred upgrades for the forums. The two biggest ones are:
    • The DB is starting to hit its RAM limits and will likely need another upgrade sometime next year
    • The Redis cache really need to be brought into GCP form DO and it is also pushing the limits of its allocated RAM atm
  • The Redis costs for the forums is a worse case scenario. I want to try the $46.43 sized instance first, but its only a bit larger then what is running on DO right now so if it turns out to still be too small the next tier up is the $208.05 instance. Due to how significant that price jump is I decided to err on the side of caution.
  • The 20% buffer is to take into account errors, general cost increases, and give some breathing room to allow patreons to feel they can drop and come back later if needed without feeling like if they did drop it would put WG just right back into the red.
  • The Paypal transfer fee is the fee to move the funds out of Patreon and into our checking account each month. Its usually 1% but caps out at $20 which is why its at an even $20.
General Operating Expenses Cost/Month
Legal & Accounting $38.59
Quickbooks $47.59
Total $86.18
Service/Resource Forum’s Cost/Month Wiki’s Cost/Month Main Site Estimated Cost/Month Util Cost/Month
Compute $210.46 $4.37 $133.22 $154.45
Bandiwdth $97.29 $15.83 $200.00 -
DB $107.12 $9.37 $135.00 $15.00
Redis $208.05 - $46.43 -
Automated Email $6.11 - $89.95 -
Backup & Storage $74.96 - $99.90 $0.54
Elastic Search - - $113.83 -
Auth - - - $57.00
Logging - - - $63.65
Domains & Email - - - $12.31
Misc - - - $7.20
Total $703.99 $29.57 $818.33 $310.15
Totals Cost/Month
Avg Operating Costs $86.18
Avg Service Costs $1,862.04
Buffer (20% of operating costs + service costs) $389.64
Paypal Transfer Fees $20.00
Total Estimated Monthly Costs $2,357.86

FAQ

Q: $2400/month seems really steep, is there any way it could be brought down?

  • A: No, the numbers above may be pessimistic but they are very realistic figures. I have already had things running fairly shoestring so I don’t have a lot of wiggle room for reducing costs outside of fully dialing back some things like the forums.

Q: What about the main site? Can’t you just drop that?

  • A: No, a ton of the most common complaints I get I have been building the main site to solve and can not be easily solved on a forum format. I am sorry to say but if one of the two had to survive I would move forward with the main site just bc most users tend to use the forums to browse for games anyway so I would much rather improve that experience then continue using the forum as an indefinite stopgap.

Q: What about X related to costs?

  • A: I know this is going to sound harsh, but I am fairly tired of having to justify the costs and numbers all the time. The numbers above are accurate and realistic and if you want to see how the costs have risen through the years I have a full section dedicated to our financial statements and I will be adding in 2024’s yearly statement to that pile hopefully tomorrow (12/7). So unfortunately, I wont be responding to any arguments about the numbers in this topic. The numbers above are how things currently stand.

Q: What is DO and GCP?

  • A: DO stands for Digital Ocean and GCP is Google Cloud Platform, these are where I host most of Weight Gaming Infrastructure.

Q: What is the Main SIte?

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Alright, here’s my #1 question from reading both this and the message in the other post, and I’m not sure if I missed it (but going to ask again anyway), but. Why is there rule against donating more than $250/Month?

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Mainly two reasons

  1. Its a big shock when a large donor has to drop and that has caused me issues in the past so I would like to funding more spread out
  2. The more important reason is a very generous Patreon recently went homeless and stayed on longer then they should have just because they didn’t want to leave me holding the bag. So I hope by capping it to $250 it will spread the costs out enough that it can hopefully prevent that and allow people to dip when IRL gets in the way.
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Glad to see this up, let’s keep a good thing going :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

One suggestion I’ll make for the Patreon page itself would be to add a post detailing its role in the new effort to keep everything open. Right now the newest post is from 2022, and people going to the Patreon specifically to donate for the site might get confused and wonder if they’re at the right place.

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Fair point, I will update that tonight.

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I was planning on donating regardless of the price since this site has been nothing but good to me, but to see the amount was a bit of a surprise given the numbers thrown around originally. I understand the desire to get the main site up and running, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some people were a bit dissuaded by how much of the fundraising goal was going towards something that there hasn’t been much news about in a while. Is there anything that you could share in regards to the main site to maybe help people get an idea of what the money would be going towards?

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I think these two videos show off some of the more user facing features the best


Just on the user side some of the stuff I have been implementing is:

  • Real time search
  • Advanced filters
  • Embedded preview video and images
  • Last Updated
  • Versioned Download
  • Automatic marking of games that have went 1 year without an update
  • Excluded content list
  • Recommended Games based on set preferences
  • Better browsing experience
  • Preview on hover when browsing
  • Optional notifications of updates
  • (Oddly enough) Integration with the forum for discussion and feedback

There is a fair bit of dev stuff as well such as patreon/kofi integration, secured file storage, and team tools to share dev builds with a team but not going to go crazy far into that rn.

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I’m not very familiar with Patreon system, so I’m sorry if I’m wrong, but does it allows donations without register, login, subscribe on creator’s page and so on? What if someone wants just donate, without being subscriber? Are there any other possible ways to simply give you some ammount of money? If not, how about to add them?

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i told you in the future of weight gaming thread, you need to make people want to donate.
i get the moderation needs, but effectively shutting down the main appeal of your service is NOT the way to handle things.
that is the opposite of giving people a reason to donate.
and what happens if someone just makes their own weight gaming while the projects category is down?
instead of investing more time and money into a service that might not even come back up, people are probably just going to leave for the alternative.

and speaking of money…

No one can donate more then $250/month.

that is also not how you should be doing it.
i understand why you dont want to be reliant on a handful of whales, but the truth is that its how places like this stay afloat
i’d also like to point out the stupidity in begging for money while actively denying people with way too much of it, beggars cant be choosers.

hate to say it, but at this point im almost completely convinced that you’re trying to kill the site.
and if you are, please just say that you want to shut it all down so that people can prepare and set up alternatives instead of doing this whole song and dance that wastes everyone’s time.

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Is there a place to ask questions about the wiki? It seems rather important given the deadline when the projects category will be locked down soon.

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Christ.

  1. We need more mods, that much is abundantly clear. And with the small moderation team in place currently they don’t have the time to do all of their current moderation duties and recruit more mods. Grot has been to the ER twice already due to the stress of running this site, we really don’t need to be piling on even more work for him to do. That’s the whole point of these last few threads. This is a (hopefully) temporary measure while everything gets sorted out.

  2. I don’t think you really do understand the reason behind the $250 cap. Like Grot has already stated, if one of those big donors quits then that puts the financials of this site back into jeopardy once more. There are thousands of people who use this site, small donations from all of us can easily cover the costs. Basic maths, but only 240 people need to donate $10 to cover everything, not to mention that $250 is already a large sum of money to be donating monthly.

  3. What part of any of this tells you Grot wants to kill the site? If that were the case, this place would have been gone months ago without any word or effort to change things up. I thought I could be quite cynical at times, but this is a whole new level.

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I’m glad that the community has been given a chance here, and I personally am happy to contribute to the forums staying open. However, my major point of contention here is with the closing of the projects category on 1/1. I feel like no matter how long this lasts, it’s going to end up doing damage to the forums. My only request would be for some guarantee that this wouldn’t happen or would be extremely brief if a specific donation goal is met in time.

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Get real, man. He said in the last thread that one of the site’s whales went HOMELESS after donating “tens of thousands” to the site. That is their own fault, but at the same time, how are you going to expect him to not do something to prevent someone from making the same mistake?

There could be a solution that allows whales to make their large donations without burdening them long-term, though. Maybe a system that allows one-off donations could be useful. Maybe we can come up with some ideas instead of bashing the admin.

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how are you going to expect him to not do something to prevent someone from making the same mistake?

one person being irresponsible with their limited money shouldn’t be what stops people that understand their situation from donating large amounts.
yeah it sucks that that person went homeless, but “richfattylover35” has an abundance of money and wants to help keep the site afloat. why stop him?

Maybe we can come up with some ideas instead of bashing the admin.

yes, the idea is letting whales donate what they want to instead of implementing arbitrary limits.

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I don’t disagree with you. Turning away a true wealthy patron would be a damn shame. Maybe Grot would be willing to reconsider this restriction if there was some way of knowing that the donor wasn’t destroying themselves to make it happen. My naive thought is a simple Discord check-in every couple months, but that has many problems. Is there some other way to offer the admins some peace of mind that their free service isn’t bankrupting someone?

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Grot is financially, mentally, and physically hanging on a thread, with the constant threat of his only source of income vanishing in an instant; and there is no guarantee that the fundraiser will succeeded, regardless of if the projects category is locked down or not. If he holds off on the original plan and the fundraiser fails, well, that’s a huge set back and puts him and the site in an even more dangerous position. It’s stupid to put all your eggs in one basket, especially when the only thing holding that basket together is the hypothetical support and goodwill of hundreds of people, which any one of them can just pull out whenever and weaken the basket. There needs to be a plan B to fall back on if things don’t work out.

I also don’t entirely believe that projects category lockdown = no support. A good amount of people didn’t feel the need to encourage doing a fundraiser until they heard about Grots drastic plan to cut cost; people didn’t feel like they needed to donate until a big banner was slapped on top of the site saying “WE ARE IN THE RED, HELP!!”; and as the saying goes, I believe people “won’t know what they have until it’s gone”. When the threat of the projects category was made known, people ACTED, but I believe there are still people out there who don’t understand or don’t care about what the lockdown entails, and won’t act until they feel the effects of the projects category lockdown.

Yeah, people may leave in search for alternatives, but I don’t think they’ll ever find or create anything comparable to these forums. Why do I think this? Because I learned it the hard way.
A few years ago, I got wrapped up in some stupid mess, and left Furaffinity for what I thought was a good cause. I tried alternatives, I stayed away from that site for as long as I possible could, but I couldn’t, nobody in our pathetic ““boycot”” could. I was the last one to cave and return, I stayed off of that site for over a year, and I learned so many important lessons about accusations, bandwagons, misinformation, etc, during that time.
If I was still the same teenager as I was back then, while all of this Weight Gaming stuff is going on, I would’ve said “fuck this” and bailed ship at the sight of Grot’s post about genAI… But I didn’t, because I already learned that lesson the hard way. I’m not saying you shouldn’t search for alternatives when the current site goes to shit (example: Twitter/X to Bluesky), but moreso that you won’t get very far unless there is a massive, conjoined effort for change.

I don’t think the lockdown of the projects category is going to kill weight gaming, but the upkeep of weight gaming HAS been killing somebody. Something drastic needs to happen; whether it’s the extreme axing and cutting down on costs, or the overwhelming support of the community keeping this forum alive; whether you like it or not.

I have nothing to say about whales, except that they are the biggest and fattest creatures I know, and that’s what I love so much about them.

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Grot, have you already considered adding a Ko-fi or similar for one-time donations? One of my favorite podcasts has both a Patreon and a Ko-fi and is able to stay afloat that way. (If that’s been considered and rejected, cool)

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  1. We need more mods, that much is abundantly clear. And with the small moderation team in place currently they don’t have the time to do all of their current moderation duties and recruit more mods. Grot has been to the ER twice already due to the stress of running this site.

and that means that there are multiple times in the past where the problems should’ve been taken care of.
this is going to sound cruel, and thats because it is, but the first stress induced ER visit should have been a very clear and blatant warning sign that grot needed to offload some of the stress by bringing in more moderators and putting up a funding goal banner.
and i wont sugar coat it, ignoring that warning sign was probably the dumbest course of action grot could’ve taken. these are problems that should have been addressed years ago rather than letting them build up to the monstrosity they are now.

THAT SAID!

its better late than never, its good that he’s taking stress of his shoulders and ultimately it’ll be beneficial for everyone involved.
but

This is a (hopefully) temporary measure while everything gets sorted out.

the problem here is that this is a complete pause on the site’s primary purpose, even if its only for a week it wont mesh well with the donation goals. but from the looks of things, it seems like grot wants to shut down the projects category for several months at the bare minimum.
and unless some massive changes are made to the wiki, it wont serve as anything even remotely close to a viable replacement for the forums.
this will damage the forums overall, and likely end up killing the site in the long run

  1. I don’t think you really do understand the reason behind the $250 cap

oh i do. the problem is that there usually are not enough singular donors willing or capable of donating indefinitely to keep a place afloat.
sure, the 3 month goal can be met. but what happens to everyone after they’ve ‘saved da forums’?
chances are, they’ll just cancel the patreon subscription and we’re right back in the red.
its just the nature of places like this. at the end of the day the whales are needed, there’s not much else to say about it.

  1. What part of any of this tells you Grot wants to kill the site?

still insisting on closing the projects category.
as i said above it will impact the site no matter how short the duration is, and the longer it goes on the worse off the site is as a whole.

surely there must be a middle ground where grot can find more moderators without closing the projects sections for a while?

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