I’m sorry for butting in without replying to the entirety of your post, but…
…but, so can whales, I’ve seen Grot say multiple times that a few of the biggest contributors to the Patreon dropped out at some point, it’s not just the person who went homeless.
Somebody dropping their $10 membership is going to hurt a lot less than somebody dropping their $250 membership.
and i understand that, but thats just how these things work. even if the whales drop, with the way the patreon subscriptions are rising (currently at $1,396, more than doubled since last night) there will be ample surplus.
a stockpile can be made as a fallback if donations are below the desired threshold, and the funding banner can be put back up to let people know that things are low.
edit: part of the problem with funding is that nobody really knew the situation since it was all just in the news category without ever being announced.
and now that the banner’s been put up, the patreon’s skyrocketed in funding in just 15 hours.
No, there is not to my understanding.
I have actually considered adding kofi for one time donations and would like to add that as an option in the furture, but one time donations can be very sporadic and I need to see fairly consistent support atm so its not on my list atm.
Not atm, I plan on trying to set something up for that though once I get the wiki moderator sorted out.
The main reason I am locking down posting is to help Krod and I focus on getting moderation stuff sorted and new mods on by only having to deal with the current projects currently in the forum. I don’t think this will take us the full 6 months but may take us 2-3 to get fully sorted depending on irl schedules, ease of finding more mods, and how quickly the plan comes together.
As I said above if the goal is hit before the 6 month deadline and we are done with getting everything sorted out on the moderation side I will be happy to reopen the projects category early.
The thing is most “whales” don’t have an over abundance of money. There is quite a lot of research out about it but the general case is most of the highest spenders tend to not be in a good place to do so. And beyond that life happens. As with my ER visit anything medical related can put a ton of strain even on some one who is well off.
If I exclude TL0 we have around 20,000 registered users. If only 5% of them all donated $5 we would hit the goal np. Even with the $250 limit that only requires 10 donors. Its not unrealistic and I feel its a fair limit.
eh, fair enough.
i just hope you consider a way to let the big spenders throw their money around if they want to.
maybe include a “if you want to donate more, please talk to me personally about payment” on the patreon? that way you can actually get a gauge on their current situation and if you’d be fine with taking what they’re offering.
I would not be opposed to a case by case consideration but its still to early for me to want to try that yet. If it looks to stall out though I dont feel that is an unfair suggestion for me to try.
I appreciate you breaking down the expenses like you did and I’ve already subbed what I can to support. (Insert I’m doing my part!.gif)
I will say seeing a site that doesn’t exist yet cause the price to double is a bit of a bummer. I understand that making it addresses feedback you’re getting, I mean even my post in the previous thread was talking about site reworks. Personally, I didn’t know how limited forums were, but I’ve since spun up a few in my homelab and yeah… those things really don’t give you much leeway for customization.
That being said, I think people are more concerned with and want to preserve what we have, not what could be. Personally, I’d hope to see you consider dropping the plans for the new site and keeping the forums that everyone currently uses as a potential course of action. Maybe hold a community vote on it? The new site would add requested functionality, but I’d think people would trade that potential in order to keep the community and functions that we currently do have. Plus, not having to develop a new site would take a lot of work off your plate and allow you to relax a bit. I just think the focus should be trimming the fat (terrible choice of words given the fetish) to keep things sustainable. Doubling the monthly cost to cover something that doesn’t really exist yet and adds to the workload when our main struggles are cost and manpower makes it look like prime chopping material.
I wont lie, I am being a bit selfish there. The thing is I could drop it, but the complaints wont stop and it will only continue to get worse as the forums continue to grow.
If I was more confident that I wouldn’t be fielding the same complaints that I have been for most of the sites operation I would maybe be a bit more receptive to considering that, but the trends I have seen so far is it wont stop.
Also, the main site was always the plan, even Kilif told me he wanted to do that when I took over. The forums may have become the de-facto thing but it was only ever supposed to act as a stopgap until I could get the main site out
I’ve gone back and forth for a while, but I just can’t in good conscience donate toward keeping things going the way they are.
I really think Grot should take bigger steps to keep himself safe, and this effort feels like a bargaining half-measure that’s just going to keep him on the hook for longer. Almost a worst of both worlds where the community still loses most of what they want (assuming project discussions are still going away), but Grot also doesn’t get the peace and calm he needs.
Ironically, the thing that would convince me to donate would probably be a commitment to doing less, delegating more, and focusing on the features people currently want and are using, instead of betting everything on hail mary future ideas.
Edit: I’d even donate to a counter-fundraiser where the amount raised is subtracted from the goal if such an option was made available. That way I’d be able to say thank you and hasten real change being made.
Man I can’t believe we’re at the point where grot gets berated for not wanting to milk people for all of their money.
Yeah I will say their has been a lot of negitive sentiment on here lately (Something I have added to myself at certain points) criticism can be deserved and a really good thing and the moderation team is receptive to it from what I have seen.
No answer is gonna be perfect but I think a lot of people could benefit from taking a step back and reminding themselves that grot and others are real people that need to put food on the table and pay rent almost everyone here wants the site to do well and stay up but not at the expense of bleeding anyone dry. You can disagree on how to do that but we should get along a lot more then we do tbh
I hope you realize that this is a major '“kick the can” action, more than anything else.
It gives you the runway to try and get more moderators (which are desperately needed more than almost anything else right now), but it doesn’t solve almost any of the underlying issues which have been discussed in any of the prior posts. It’s a hail mary call-to-action for… maintaining the status quo, just about? After so many of your posts discussed how things weren’t working in their current state?
I’ve been donating before any of this came up, and I’m going to keep donating, because I believe that the community should be the primary support for this place, but I’m worried that there aren’t any firm timelines or milestone dev-maps for anything but the failure-state. Can you provide some updates about where you stand on the desired realistic future-state of WeightGaming? Like, how much of the main site is coded or laid out or just awaiting funds? What parts are feature-complete for launch, what are in testing, what are still only rough designs?
Based on the current Patreon upswing, I figure you’ll be hitting the goal at least this month. I’m not worried about undercutting you with this post. But I’d really like some reassurance that there’s movement here, given that a lot of these things have been sitting kind of publicly-silent since 2022, and I imagine I’m not the only person.
i wanna mention patreon lets you add money to your main account now too instead of using paypal. if that is an option id recomend it as paypal sucks ass! sorry i cant donate as i am also in a finanical situation…
might i say tho cloud costs are way too high id consider switching cloud services because even huge companies only pay about 900 for cloud services. so do concider switching for your own peice of mind!
Are you considering adding a ko-fi or something similar for one time payments for people who would rather / are in a position where they need to choose when to do a one time payments? Options like that I think will be a big help
Grot wrote about it here. Short version is he wants to do it, but it won’t be soon
Hi, first of all congratulations and what’s been raised so far, that is incredible and (if I may dare think so) looks very promising so far. I know it’s early stages, but I want to be optimistic. So much going on in the world, it’s way too easy to be pessimistic about things.
I wanted to ask a question, too. Will locking down the Project categories be limited to locking down new posts only, or a mass-lockdown to the entire category such as done with the Game Jam / Gain Jam archived categories?
It will only restrict new topics being created within the projects category. I have no plans on locking and archiving the existing topics like we do with the Jam until the 6 month deadline is reached (and assuming we don’t meet the goal which it looks like we might so that point may be mute).
Oh, this whole time I was assuming that all existing project threads were going to be locked down too, meaning no new replies could be made either.
I think others have assumed this too, seeing how some people are reacting to the news of a project category lockdown
Atm my focus has been on the security backbone which is where I got hung up last time. Here is a list of what I am currently working on and what needs to be done for a MVP:
The main thing to keep in mind with the above is authentication & authorization tends to be a ton of work, so those 1st 3 tasks are really major lifts and make up a large majority of the needed work.
There are other features that I plan on having out within the first month of release and others like the asset store that will come out latter. Originally I had to have a lot more features ready before I could release but since I am going to keep it more restricted then I originally planned I can afford to roll out features more incrementally so it made me feel a lot less overwhelmed by it all.
As for dates, I am just hesitant to say anything as I have had my plans get derailed by IRL stuff a bit to frequently so I would prefer to give a firmer date once I am more certain I can make it.
Ya, sorry I could have maybe explained that better. Due to how the terminology is overloaded I can have a hard time explaining it clearly and I assumed the fact I was talking about the category most people would know I was not planning on locking down the individual projects until latter.
That was my bad.