Sigh, ads yet again (or, Donations always welcome)
Well I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Every time some ad company is about to pay out to me, they pull our advertising. For those of you who aren't supporters, you may notice the lack of ads.
I've signed up for yet another advertising site but who knows anymore. Anyone who feels like donating, it is always greatly appreciated. I wish I could offer more than a cool icon and an email address, but as soon as the F7Lans stuff is finished we'll be adding some Supporter benefits over there as well.
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Wow man that sux0rs. It's almost like a conspiracy or something.
For everyone else, donating is really easy and (contrary to popular belief) safe using the PayPal setup msleeper made. You don't even have to create an account! Even a small donation of $5 or $10 helps a lot.
If you have no money, hey we've all been there, you can still try to help out by clicking on the ads. You don't have to actually read the pages, just click, click, click and close the tabs. I still do this, despite being a supporter (no banner ads for me!) AND having AdBlock Plus installed (I allow the ads on this site only). Now if msleeper can stop this conspiracy against him, the site gets some money for your clicking.
Maybe it's just me...but there is no way this website generates that much traffic and bandwidth a month. I know you co-locate your own server but asking us to pay for your expensive and largely inefficient method of hosting is fraud. Unless this site racks up over 1500GB of disk space and 15000GB of bandwidth a month...you are wasting money. The host for my personal website (ran by good friends with lots of experience in the industry) offers that much space/bandwidth for $8 a month. This isn't basic shitty hosting either, full telnet access, cpanel, as many emails/domains/sql databases/ftp accounts/ect. Obviously you can't host your own game servers but if you are doing that you should be keeping that separate or have good reason to get your own server.
I am all for keeping this site active but if you are not efficiently hosting it and extorting money from members to keep your personal server operational...I can't help but to resist any donations and endorsement of such.
Then you have an excellent host. My host, who sells me his bandwidth at cost, only gives 700MB storage and 40k MB transfer for such a price. The point here is, you seem to be getting an excellent bargain: I wouldn't take that to be a general sign of prices.
But even taking the $8 figure on faith, at $8 per month, I doubt this operation would have broken even from donations anyways.
..extorting money from members to keep your personal server operational...
By using such loaded language, you infer some kind of force or coercion as well as deception. That strikes me as dishonest.
What I've seen is a guy kindly asking people to contribute to what they use but by no means requiring it. Also, I'm not sure why you state that this is his personal server; this may be, but I see no evidence of that. Likewise, I'm not sure where you pulled this spectre of inefficient hosting out of, because I'm unaware of it. The closest thing I've seen is the plethora of extra space that we have, which hardly seems "inefficient". More like "optimistic".
My understanding of the situation is that MS runs the whole operation out of his own pocket, and is just trying to defray his personal costs.
FYI, we get about 50,000 unique visitors a month, and over 1,000,000 page hits. MyPHPsig, which is also run on this server, doesn't generate half that number - and it's used/linked on about 500 different forums!
If not a single person ever donated, this site would still be online. No banks are being broken in the production of this website, and I'm not going to revoke the download database or the wiki or anything. Donations help keep the site alive, they don't keep the site alive on their own. I guess what I'm getting at is that the donations aren't a required activity, and they're just a way for people who care about the site to say thanks to me and f0rkz for running it.
As Hober said, a little help goes a long way.
Please do not Private Message me for assistance. Post a thread if you have questions or concerns.
If you need to contact the staff privately, contact the Global Moderators via Discord.
I spend alot of time here. And, for alot of reasons, I take pride in the "supporter" icon under my name. I donated because i wanted to. Have even considered donating again. This website is open to EVERYONE, even guests, and to get !!!!!FULL!!!!! benefits all one has to do is register. thats it. i see no extortion.
Noone makes anyone come here, stay here, or donate.
i have alot more to say. but choose not to.
Oh I understand fully the work and troubles that go into creating and running a site...perhaps I was more suggesting other methods for the site. Such as moving it to a private server or something where it would be a lot cheaper to run and operate and you wouldn't have to worry about ads/dontations at all.
Perhaps I took some things wrong but the donation spam makes it seem like the server is struggling to stay alive and I would much rather find an easier solution than relying on donations if that is the problem. I love my TWP and I am just afraid at any thought of seeing it go! 
keep in mind these guys are not just giving us a free web site that has what we "want" but also they give away fucking prizes.. that shit ain't free (to them) either.
Good point. When I chose to donate it was mostly for prizes. I love the contests but it seems we get more (quantity and quality) entries when we have a prize. More maps = more fun for all.
I'm sure msleeper could find a less expensive or even free alternative for hosting but what's $8 a month really?? Like he said, it's not breaking his bank account running this site. What I think he should emphasize more often is that donations go towards prizes too.
It seems to me that he only posts donation reminders after we haven't had a donation in a few months. That would be after he put out the $8 a month plus some cash towards prizes out of his own pocket, which you have to admit is a pretty cool thing of him to do.
Oh, and I am proud of my sponsor tag too.
