Trench Wars Holiday Donation Drive

[Rough]

Without your support, Trench Wars as we know it will be shutting down June 30st, 2019.

Trench Wars bots, websites and forums are 100% volunteer-funded and supported. Server costs are only $100 per month. Yet the most recent accounting puts us at just $600, leaving just 6 more months of funding. At the end of these 6 months, all bots, websites, forums and files hosted by and associated with Trench Wars will go offline. (However, the game server itself, which is provided by PriitK, will continue to run.)

Generous donors have kept this ship afloat for decades now. Without them, TW would be long gone. A huge THANK YOU to everyone who has donated in the past -- and another thank you for everyone who has donated their time and effort as part of staff, as a league organizer, as a squad captain, as a community content contributor, or as a die-hard player that keeps the game going.

In normal circumstances, these few humble financial donors have been enough to ensure the longevity of TW. However, in recent years, server costs have begun to outstrap donations. I've been holding off making this plea for a long time, but I knew this day would come. Well ... here we are.

Have you enjoyed TW over the years? Has it been part of your life for a long time now? This is your chance to give a little something back in tribute to those great memories. Remember all of the people you've met (and destroyed), the leagues, the events, the rivalries, and the friendships that continue to this day. Think about what that's been worth to you. Can you give $20, $10, or even just $5 to make sure TW keeps going strong? For every $100 donated, TW can survive for 1 more month! Click the link below to give any amount:

Yes, I want to see TW continue for years to come!

During this special promotion (running through the New Year):

• All donations will receive DOUBLE the amount of complimentary PubBux. A great chance to increase your fat space stacks AND do something good for the zone.
• Donate more than $10 and you can choose one of the weekend events. (Post in this thread, DM me, or ?message me in-game after donating.)
• Donate more than $50 and your name and donation amount will appear on the public map for a limited time! (Please notify me if you do NOT want your name to appear, or select "Anonymous" when making your donation.)
• The top 3 donors during the promotion will receive a special gift! (Details TBA)

Thank you for considering a donation. We accept all major credit cards via PayPal (no account required). Everything helps!

Donate here: http://www.trenchwars.org/donations


Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a Happy New Year to all! And don't forget: have guns and travel Subspace.

Lol Zidane Ease Claushouse just had a heart attack reading this 100%

[Falconeer]

What I'm getting at is why not just lay out the costs, and link the prices and host?

The public/donors should want to know
1. The websites being supported: so they can decide if ALL these websites are necessary and if they can be centralized on 1 site.
2. The minimum amount of space required to support everything: 2 gigs? 5 gigs? 10 gigs? (remember this is a game from 1996, why would you need 100 gigs?)
3. If any type of server speed is required/desirable... and then for what? It's not zone hosting...

You SHOULD also when you have time, take the time to write up or explain the work involved in *high* detail to move everything to a new host. What type of features are being used? How was the website made? In a text editor? using Cpanel? Using a website building program? Using an offline program? Would a transfer be done through FTP work only? Do we really want antiquated/complex systems for running sites... why? to keep the high end programmers as the people we have to rely on? Isn't it just way easier and more versatile to use cpanel? Yes or No and why? Like come on... so many years, and zero transparency.

Stop treating people like children, idiots, or criminals. People are capable of seeing logical well thought out points, and then possibly agreeing with you and accepting that it is tough to move everything and maybe the costs are worth it... but with zero information i'm not just going to take your word for it.

imo this info should have been written up long ago and left as a link on the donation page

[SpaceHiker]

We've done a price comparison many times over the years, and haven't found anything remotely compelling enough to suggest migration would be worth it.

Just FYI, An AWS spot instance would likely cost a small fraction. You know how much data you use in a month so it would be easy to calculate the cost. People are afraid of spot instances shutting down without warning, but if you set your max bid to the normal cost of an instance, it won't shut down. I've run them for many months at a time. I've had high traffic spot instances that cost $3 a month. AWS has proven reasonably adept at blocking ddos and other bad traffic. It's worth checking into, if you provide me your monthly transfer I can run the cost on my aws control panel.

[Falconeer]

If you actually use CPanel, it would take a very long time to explain the details behind migrating a very old server. Many people with far more expertise than you (and than me) have already considered many options, and come to the conclusion that we receive sufficient value from Linode. I apologize if that's not sufficiently transparent, but them's the breaks, kid.

In other words you're not willing to share the actual details of the costs, and requirements. You decided you know what's best, or that these other people know what's best. The actual donor has no say or input into what's really going on.

Yeah I get people are lazy asses. But you're essentially a sysop to dev, not to play moderator and police and judge people. When was the last time you deved anything? Beginning of this year? If moving the website/bot hosting brings the cost to half price you're already making big improvements. As well as getting rid of redundant websites...

Bottom line is some jack ass probably bought the best hosting package because while subspace takes 2% of the space on it, they can use the other 95% for their personal use..

In that case go make a Counter Strike Global Server and rake in donations that way.

There's no reason for the secrecy.

[qan]

...

If you actually use CPanel, it would take a very long time to explain the details behind migrating a very old server. Many people with far more expertise than you (and than me) have already considered many options, and come to the conclusion that we receive sufficient value from Linode. I apologize if that's not sufficiently transparent, but them's the breaks, kid.

[qan]

Also, want to apologize for coming off as a bit alarmist. We hadn't reviewed the account in a few months, so I was pretty shocked to see we only had $600 left, and that's reflected in the tone of this drive. The last few years we've hovered around $1000, which is a comfortable enough cushion, with people donating here and there, always keeping it relatively level. We haven't done enough in the way of normal fundraising, letting people know, hey, we do still need money to keep things going. So we've seen donations fall off. And as this is completely a volunteer operation, we do tend to just put out fires, running from one to the next.

The game server itself is about $300 a month, covered by PriitK. This hosts Trench Wars, Extreme Games, Chaos, and the billing server.

The TW bot/web/database server costs $100 a month, and this is paid out of the donations account. We basically put a freeze on using donations for anything else but the server expenses a few years back. Donations began to trickle off as population declined, so this became a necessity. And we're really lucky to have had so many people who care enough about the game to donate in order to see it continue.

Yes, it's true that if nobody donates, we'll basically revert to pre-Robo Ref days. I seriously doubt that we'll ever get to that point, though. I'm betting there are many of us, myself included, who if we're at the very end of the line, will be willing to step up and pay for a month, if it means the difference between TW staying up or shutting down. We're not there yet.

This push for donations is about not getting to that point, living month to month. Unfortunately we're far too close to the edge to mean this is just a normal donation drive, though. It's gotten to the place where it's not just it "would be nice" for people to donate. It's become serious. If you choose to donate, you'll know that you're doing something that's actually quite urgently needed.

[Falconeer]

Merry Xmas Myth! Great to see you around. Let's dooo itttttt!!



We run a single Linode server, which runs our array of sites, various secondary services, plus the bots and database. Wirah also runs a supplementary server out of his pocket. I run the dev server out of my pocket.

The Linode VPS is $80 for hosting plus $20 for a regular backup service. If forced, we can trim the backup to squeak out a little extra time, though it's saved us once in the past and would not be a smart move.

We've done a price comparison many times over the years, and haven't found anything remotely compelling enough to suggest migration would be worth it.



Curses! As a sworn member of the Subspace Illuminati, I am required to always reveal the ruse in some subtle clue. You've caught me out!

Thanks ... for some reason, ran the "30 days past September" rhyme through my head and must only have gotten to April... Pro!

That tells us nothing. What are your space requirements. Currently how much data is being stored? 1 Gigabyte? 10 Gigabytes? Evidence? Screenshot of the total amount of files and the gigabytes taken up? A link to the website host? with their price tables?

Where is the $600 figure coming from, with a $100 price tag? Is that $100 a month?

Where is the list of websites? And what currently takes up the most space in gigabytes? Is it the sites? 5 megabyte bots? what?

I have nothing against donations, but 1. You'd get more donors if you were open about this 2. Only an idiot would choose to throw their money at you without facts or critical thinking, but it's their money so their choice. 3. It's how you go about it which I think is wrong. You are even entitled to donations for development work you do if that's what you want... but then you should specifically say the donations are to help enable you to still have some time devving on subspace. etc... like be up front about it imo.

Also wtf is this? does it come with CPANEL or it's just cloud space?

Here is cloud space at roughly $280 a year for 20 gigs. What are you paying so much for? https://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/pricing

General1-1 1GB 1 20GB SSD ? 200Mb/s $0.032/hr + $0.005/hr

And there is no way in hell tw website should be taking up more than 10 gigs.. even the zone. MY WHOLE subspace development folder which is packed with images, graphics, LVZ files, and 100 zone folders with arenas and maps comes to 3 gigs. The fuck are you paying for. I don't get it. MATCH data is literally text files, there is no heavy data in it, it's text information...

this other site has even better pricing? at $5 a month with 1TB transfer, you don't need high end stuff to run a website: https://www.linode.com/pricing

[qan]

Anyway, donated $25 just now. Took 25 seconds. Then I logged in and collected my 600k pub bux. Shit felt good man. Merry Christmas. I once spent new year's eve with people on here way back when my life was completely shitty. But that night wasn't shitty. This game is the shit. There's still some good times to be had. Now that we're all adults, how about you spend some of the christmas money you've saved up and donate.

T W D T 2 0 1 9 SIGN THE FUCK UP WE GOTTA GET PODCASTS GOING. I'LL CAP THIS SHIT AGAIN IF I NEED TO I LOVE SUBSPACE!!!!!!!

Merry Xmas Myth! Great to see you around. Let's dooo itttttt!!

(Spittle-infused posts requesting details)

We run a single Linode server, which runs our array of sites, various secondary services, plus the bots and database. Wirah also runs a supplementary server out of his pocket. I run the dev server out of my pocket.

The Linode VPS is $80 for hosting plus $20 for a regular backup service. If forced, we can trim the backup to squeak out a little extra time, though it's saved us once in the past and would not be a smart move.

We've done a price comparison many times over the years, and haven't found anything remotely compelling enough to suggest migration would be worth it.

June 31st..a non-existent day....makes sense

Curses! As a sworn member of the Subspace Illuminati, I am required to always reveal the ruse in some subtle clue. You've caught me out!

Thanks ... for some reason, ran the "30 days past September" rhyme through my head and must only have gotten to April... Pro!

[Materix]

June 31st..a non-existent day....makes sense

He obviously meant end of the month.

[Leland]

June 31st..a non-existent day....makes sense

smart man

[FoolishPleasure]

June 31st..a non-existent day....makes sense

[Falconeer]

How can you ask people for money, without giving details? I would never fucking do that, because despite all my trash talk i have more morality all of you fucking pretenders.

[Falconeer]

Your biggest donation to the game would be uninstalling. You don't even know what the hell qan's post is about. Please shut the fuck up already.



This is amazing to think about. SS has been the best game I've ever played. Consider a lot of these people very good friends. Wish I could fly my warbird over the traffic in DC. Yet this was only possible because some generous people paid over $20,000 during the last 20 years while I enjoyed it for free.

Anyway, donated $25 just now. Took 25 seconds. Then I logged in and collected my 600k pub bux. Shit felt good man. Merry Christmas. I once spent new year's eve with people on here way back when my life was completely shitty. But that night wasn't shitty. This game is the shit. There's still some good times to be had. Now that we're all adults, how about you spend some of the christmas money you've saved up and donate.

T W D T 2 0 1 9 SIGN THE FUCK UP WE GOTTA GET PODCASTS GOING. I'LL CAP THIS SHIT AGAIN IF I NEED TO I LOVE SUBSPACE!!!!!!!

Judge people more idiot, morons who throw stones when they literally act the same fucking way. What you just said to me doesn't make you better than me. So since we're the same why are you fucking judgeing? Do you know me? What I've done? What work i've done for zones and squads? No. You just dislike me and rage and cry about it. Eat shit seriously.

Nothing in what I said was incorrect. PROVE INCORRECTNESS. DEBATE IDEAS. DON'T FUCKING BRING THINGS TO PERSONAL ARGUMENTS ABOUT HOW I SUCK SO THEREFORE WHAT I SAY MUST BE B.S DEBATE FUCKING IDEAS OR FUCK OFF.

IS THIS INCORRECT?
1. QANS scum post was a plea to emotion, nostalgia and ego.
2. No details were given on the "accounting costs"
3. He says various things were paid for but doesn't list the hosting providers with a link to their costs.
4. THERE IS NO TRANSPARENCY
5. He doesn't trust me to do shit but then his fucking double standard kicks in and he expects everyone to blindly trust him, because he's a piece of shit that runs on "reputation" who meanwhile acts totally different in PMS than he does in public. You see his tainted ass dissing me in public? He speaks respectfully in public, the sign of someone who cares about popularity.

P.S I might have told someone to uninstall once in 20 years, and i was joking.

[zidane]

My man mythril. Cap dt? Need legio xi in this possibly final dt

tiny and trasher would make some good captains as well

[Rab]

Let it die. Time to move on.