Donations and a New Storage Server

[bluetrain]

So streaming wasn't actually a suggestion, it was always going to happen?
Why do you insist people argue with eachother on whether or not its a good idea and then just say its guaranteed to happen in the near future on the 5th page of the topic? And forgive me for thinking this thread was about saving on expenses.

No hard feelings.

Btw reply to my op i sent you of 'In Watercolors', loved it.

[Arigatomina]

So streaming wasn't actually a suggestion, it was always going to happen?

If so, there's still a good reason to mention it in this thread. One way or another, streaming will be related to donators, a perk. Telling us in advance will get some of us to donate in advance. The org needs the money now.

Here's what we need, here's we're thinking of doing. Some of it's set in stone, some are wild ideas we're tossing out there. Since you're the ones who'll be using these things, and donating to support the site, feel free to discuss amongst yourselves and offer alternatives. Oh, and by the way, if any of this sounds good, please donate now instead of waiting for it to be implemented because we need the money asap.

...that's how I read the first post. If I hadn't maxed my card for the month, I'd have donated just because Phade posted himself to ask. As it is, the "possible/guaranteed future perks" make me feel like a crap for not having an extra credit card handy to use. If they'd asked a month in advance, it would have been more convenient for those of us who have to save up for these things.

[bluetrain]

That may be true, but you shoot yourself in the foot with your logic. If these "donator-only" features are just "suggestions", then you're not sure if what you're donating/paying for (*if you feel so strongly about such features) - or in your case, saving up for. Is what you're actually going to get.

What i mean is that if the site said: Here's what is coming (for donators only):
Streaming: approx Late November
New profile customisation features: Early January
Etc etc.

Then you would be more likely to save up and donate because you know you're going to get what you want. So what i half-assedly saying before about "why leave us to debate the feature of streaming on this site?"

Would you buy shares in a an oil company that said "Do you the (shareholders) think this might be a good place to drill for oil?" or would you buy shares in one that said "We're 90% sure there is oil here, we're about to begin drilling in a months time"

Of course you'd take the second option.

Its fine to have the dicussion about alternatives etc, i just don't think its nice to mislead people into thinking something isn't set in concrete so that they can have the chance to improve the idea. When actually the idea is already set in motion for a beta-testing in the coming months - actually when you look at it that way, there's absolutley nothing wrong with it.
But when you add in the fact that the entire point of this is to encourage you and me to give up our money, i'd just prefer to know if there's going to be any further incentives to A. Donate (because like you by the sounds of things, i'm pretty strapped for cash) and B. Donate more, Because thats always a possibility.

[JaddziaDax]

I'm curious as to a list of what the admins are actually working on, and what is still in the "toss around this idea" stage.. O.o

[Garridy]

Bluetrain ,the way I see it you shouldn't be donating because of perks, you should be donating because you want to support what we are doing here at the org.

[princess myu]

Bluetrain ,the way I see it you shouldn't be donating because of perks, you should be donating because you want to support what we are doing here at the org.

or both ^_^

[bluetrain]

Oh no, i wouldn't donate because of perks, but i know a few people who would.
I've drawn up a tally of how much i owe the org - and i intend to pay it as soon as i can get some breathing space from out behind of the shadow of the maxxed out card, the car loan and the uni debts... *sigh* but that should only be a few months.

[Phade]

Hey Everyone,

Thank you for your enthusiastic response! I’ve gone through the posts and collected a list of questions. Here we go...

Merchandise:

I’m down with getting some online merchandising going. The Zazzle seems to be good, though I haven’t looked in depth at the site. Anything where we don’t have to keep an inventory is good. CafePress still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Streaming Videos:

Will streaming videos be hard to make? Each video that is uploaded can automatically be converted to a unified streaming format by the server itself. These cached streaming files will be uniform so there won't be any "you didn't encode your streaming file correctly" problems on the video creator’s end.

What about streaming quality? Teh Tube = teh sux0rz. They are a really good example of bad streaming. Vimeo much closer to what we are going for. Here is an example of typical Vimeo video quality: http://vimeo.com/877053 Even maximized to full screen, the quality is really decent. These streams are automatically created by their server; the member just uploads one file in any format.

Will the streaming video files kill storage space? Streaming video files will be smaller than the original upload (assuming you created a quality video file). We estimate that the streaming files will take an additional 20% of server space. This means with our existing 3TB of videos, we will have to use an additional 600GB for the streaming files.

Won’t streaming videos kill our bandwidth? Since streaming files are smaller than actual downloads, they have the potential to actually reduce our bandwidth usage (though bandwidth usage is not a problem). Since we have fixed hosting costs, bandwidth can be thought of as a "renewable" resource while storage space is a "non-renewable" resource. If we hypothetically max out our bandwidth today, there’s just as much bandwidth available tomorrow to do it again at no additional cost. If we use up our storage space today, there will be no more available tomorrow and it will cost us to get some more. Our current daily bandwidth usage is about 1/3 of our max.

As an added bonus to donators, we could allow embedded streaming video on external member sites.

Server Auction:

What are these "best" videos that you speak of? The star rating system would be used to calculate the videos that go onto the drives. The rating is fairly accurate as far as general public likes/dislikes. You specific opinion may vary. What I would do is order all the videos from highest to lowest rating, make a batch file to copy them over, allow the batch file to run, and you get what you get. I generally arrange the videos using the same directory structure as the site currently uses and attach a index data file that can be imported into Excel, Access, or whatever else you want.

Can we make the hard drive auction thing more than just a one-time deal? My initial reaction is "not really". It requires physical media to be mailed, filled up, and mailed again. This is hardly an automatic or trivial thing to do. Having it as a one-time event to specifically upgrade our servers is fine with me. I have put up similar hard drives into anime convention charity auctions and they fetch a couple hundred bucks each there.

Donator Perks:

What about [insert perk here]? Most of the donator perks mentioned here are really good ideas. Again, the more non-admin-involved the perk is, the better (IMHO). Most of the ones mentioned can be implemented. Some members love perks as donation incentives; some don’t care at all. We just need to find the balance of implementation time vs. perk usefulness/popularity and get them in.

Next Steps:

I will get with Derobert to confirm the quantity, type, and capacity of the hard drives we have in our servers now. Once we have that list, we can start the auctioning process. Just as a reminder to the obvious, we will need to get the auction funds received, new server ordered, implemented, videos copied over, and then old server removed before we can actually fill and send out the drives to the winners.

We will also go over the list of suggested donator perks, figure out how useful/popular they are, how hard they are to implement, and then start getting them going.

I hope this helps. This seems to be a really good discussion! Keep going!!

Thanks again and have a great day!! ^_^

Phade.

[jasper-isis]

Here's what we need, here's we're thinking of doing. Some of it's set in stone, some are wild ideas we're tossing out there. Since you're the ones who'll be using these things, and donating to support the site, feel free to discuss amongst yourselves and offer alternatives. Oh, and by the way, if any of this sounds good, please donate now instead of waiting for it to be implemented because we need the money asap.

That's pretty much it. Stuff is in the works right now, and not everything is set in stone. We want to hear people's thoughts in case there was something that we missed. However, we ask that you reserve some of your judgment for the test phase, when you'll actually have something to play around with. The call to donate is for the new storage server, an immediate pressing need. Regardless of whether or not there will be streaming videos in the future, we still need the new server, as space on the old ones is about to run out.

[Corran]

Well... I don't want to sound contradictory to Phade but I want to play it safe right now and say I'm not sure if we could do vimeo quality or embedding, at least as things are currently being designed. There are numerous factors involved but for now I would like to take things one step at a time. In the future I will be nailing the details out as much as possible with Phade and letting the org know more as the time is right. However, right now I have stuff going on in my personal life that takes precedence and I think the best time for details would probably be once we are actually in a position to implement the feature (i.e. after we have more server space).

To answer JaddziaDax, this is the only thing I've been working on for the past several months. Other coders can speak for themselves, but no feature suggestions brought up in this thread have been previously in development.

So streaming wasn't actually a suggestion, it was always going to happen?
Why do you insist people argue with eachother on whether or not its a good idea and then just say its guaranteed to happen in the near future on the 5th page of the topic?

I originally had hoped this to be a surprise feature and was a little surprised myself when Phade brought it up in this thread; however, I can understand the reason behind doing so. I wasn't sure if we should outright say, "yes, we are already working on it" and list off everything in detail or at least address the concerns being brought up regarding implementing such a feature. I didn't want the last several months of working on this to be vain and at the same time I didn't want to sound foolish if plans change drastically, we scrap the project, or anything else happens that would in effect cause me to regret saying more than I should.

Of course, as Jasper said, regardless of whether or not this feature is added, the need for a server is imminent. Streaming video doesn't matter much if there is no server to supplement the feature. I'm sure most people would agree the continued operation of the "Golden Donut" is more important at this point than any new feature that we could work on right now.

The reason extra ideas and suggestions were thrown out there is because the current cost of running the site vs donations received is not sustainable. Getting a server through a spike in donations would only be a temporary fix to the current problem. As Phade said in his first post, we've had to start using money that had been set aside for server upgrades just to keep the site running. If donations were what they used to be we probably could have done the upgrade without making this thread. However, even if we did not need to upgrade right now, eventually we would need to bring this up...