<pouring on a little...>
Frankly, Z's price for storage rather floored me, although google drive simply won't work. The account has to be able to accept uploads from multiple sources, not a single machine. Still, that very encouraging and I'll look at options. If I can get 1tb for $120 a year, I'd be willing to cover any shortfall out of pocket, as I do with the site hosting.
Let me get back to a few posts I didn't squint long enough to address earlier :-P
@ruadhri: I've never heard of Bitcoin. I'll research it. We have several european and australian sponsors who have never mentioned difficulties donating, but maybe they were just being stoic...
On the torrent: a true torrent would flagrantly violate our terms of use on this host, and very few site hosts are willing to host torrent servers (as opposed to clients) without specific arrangements (and money). And without a good population of clients, the server would be required.
Pain's pseudo-torrent idea (genius!) can take advantage of volunteer repositories of flexible size and inconsistent availability, but does not depend on them. I still want to go that route.
@Werelynx: I personally abhor ads for a non-profit community site. They just rub me wrong. I mean the ads for diapers, muscenex and deodorant. I actually am loving the idea (I think it was Shads) of replacing the What's New slideshow with *NwN* specific ads for servers and mods.
But, having stated how much I hate ads, I also said a loooong time ago that I'm building the Vault for the community and not for me. If enough of the vested members of this community want to monetize the Vault, we will monetize the Vault.
And now I want to mention something that may not be obvious to casual or new observers. There are a lot of people helping on the Vault already, and a lot of them are doing it so quietly and humbly that I am both astounded and grateful whenever I am somehow reminded of these background heroes. Specifically, I want to mention a few (only a few) that I feel have been under-appreciated by the community.
First, I want to recognize Shadooow. He is very active on the Vault, despite the tone of this thread. And his work, not only selfless, but against opposition, on the CPP is nothing short of incredible. Let no one think I have anything less than immense respect for the guy.
Second (probably the only place he's ever come in second!) is The Amethyst Dragon. The guy amazes me! Any time I start to feel over-burdened or buried alive, I look at what he's done, what he's doing and what he promises to do. If he ever drops buy HQ, I wouldn't buy him a coffee, I'd stand for a Venti java chip frap with double espresso blended in! =) What most people don't know is that he really stepped up - on the old Vault handling the ads system (until it finally broke), and recently, when I was buried with work, on the new Vault, just quietly handling business. Oh, yeah, and he took over the CCC when it really counted.
There are lots of others I could mention, but I'm only going to highlight three more.
Tarot Redhand singlehandedly mirrored at least a hundred high-value projects from the old vault to the new. He's still involved in preserving that content. Still working for *us*, without pay, with little recognition. I owe you a coffee, if you ever get over this side of the pond, bro.
Werelynx, the other crazy cat. This guy pestered me so much with corrections and pointers and links that I finally just made him an administrator. He's the guy working in the background finding broken links and spam and funny business and setting them right. But when you think of the Vault admin, you think of Rolo.... *shakes head in wonder* It takes a village to raise a Rolo =)
Finally I have a ninja old-timer for you. Fester Pot. The guy who's so quiet it takes you 20 minutes of intense googling just to find his blasted blog! Who's incredible mods are only considered "amateur" because he offers them free. *blink blink*. What you may not know about FP is the sheer *hours* he's put into moderating the Vault, fixing things and putting out fires.
Now, a thread about the difficulties of the Vault may be a funny place to recognize those contributions (oh, and I mean it, any one of you that drops by HQ gets a coffee on me. Except TAD. He gets a frap), but I did this to point out two things. First I don't think anyone is giving up on the Vault any time soon (though Shad has valid points highlighted by the fact we need to air our dirty laundry here instead of there :-P ). Second, a lot of this community is vested in the site through means other than money. That is incredibly valuable and why I keep finding ways to make up the financial shortfall.
Still, if we could get a php guru onboard, that could be very good. :-)
Heh, better get back to work. Have a little contract going live this afternoon :-P
Edit: There were 1436 different files downloaded from the new Vault in March. I don't have a count per file, though.
There are 607 active projects.
Site is using 116gb of disk space
Database is 1.2gb
<...catch-up>
