Statement regarding our new funding strategy.

[[TC]»Pete«]

This thread is in response to this thread: http://forum.city-driving.co.uk/showthre...?tid=23959

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Warped Wrote:No, I am not going to donate or take off my adblocker [...]

Ok, that's fine, no one is forcing you to do either of those things. Also, the nature of donations is that they are voluntary.

Warped Wrote:[...] but can we get more information on how the costs are so much, "several hundred pounds a year." Like, how many servers do you actually have or is there some kind of extra thingies you put your money into? I found a site where you can have an LFS server with 24/7 support, fast pings, easy management and whatever for 1 euro a month (that's about £0.87).

We do not just run an LFS server, we run a large, complex system which requires powerful hardware. I won't disclose the fine details of our servers but I can give you a quick overview.

The sites you're thinking of that charge €1 per month for a server do not offer anything close to what is required to run what we currently provide for our community. We use dedicated servers to run:

• LFS servers (currently between 6 and 9)
• 3 custom InSim applications
• Multiple statistics applications
• Multiple websites (including the forum)
• Multiple databases (Several GB total)
• Teamspeak Server
• Other misc applications, maintenance scripts etc.
• Plus Domains (4)

Our servers are in an A* data centre with business grade network protection including DDoS mitigation which altogether costs a non-trivial amount of money.
Plus, of course, we have backups stored in a geographically seperate datacentre, without which the less than 6 hours of downtime we had recently due to a hardware failure would have lasted several days.
Many of the above require full, root access to a real server. And, most importantly, we have full control of our data and custom software.

To give you an idea of our server requirements, our forum alone registers around half a million page requests every month and the bandwidth consumption of our server is around a terabyte (~1.0TB) per month of traffic alone. At busy times (eg. Gumball) it is much, much more.

We are not here to make a profit, we're here to make sure we can continue providing high quality services for our community.

Although we have been receiving donations for many years, they have left great gaps in the financing which were covered by certain members of the community over and over again. Probably about half the costs over the years have been paid for by [TC] members, who also put a lot of time and effort in to administrate the servers. You will agree that this seems a little unfair. Rest assured that this will be the case in the future if it is needed but now we are asking the community to help out so that we can distribute the weight to many shoulders rather than just a couple. The easiest and simplest way to do this is by removing your ad-blocker. Even if you don't click the adverts, you're still helping.

If you still don't like having ads, you can remove them for £5/year. When we came up with the numbers for our supporter initiative we felt that £5/year was more than reasonable for the worth of the [TC] experience, especially for those who spend many hours every week playing on our servers.

If you really must use an ad-blocker, do so, just don't whine about it.

Pete, Elmo, Chuck & the [TC] team.

Edit: Forgot the domains. ~Elmo

[[RDSR] Russ]

Why are we not allowed to discuss this in the previous thread anymore? Seems we aren't allowed a voice to be honest.

[Borja]

(2016-09-26 18:28)Pete Wrote:  we're here to make sure we can continue providing high quality services for our community.

I have my doubts on the quality, last months we were getting lot of server downs, reports(issue server thread) for high pings, the web come down lot of times too and this is happening since last months. Also, I remind this happening on gumball too.
Its true that we have quality InSim and great forum, there is no doubt with it.


Also, I suggest to relocate the ads. Not sure if its on your hands, but maybe for new users who dont know the forum at all, the first thing they see its and ad, and for those who dont have full control of their actions, or are new users, can be dangerous, so maybe relocating it to for example over server stats, can be better imo.

[Juntu]

Stop complaining about a great service that is provided for you if you donate or not. IT IS NOT MANDATORY TO DONATE. RDSR should be ashamed of trying to accuse and make stupid comments about this. Money is money and fun is fun. If you want to pay for fun then do so.

[[RDSR] Russ]

(2016-09-26 18:42)Juntu Wrote:  Stop complaining about a great service that is provided for you if you donate or not. IT IS NOT MANDATORY TO DONATE. RDSR should be ashamed of trying to accuse and make stupid comments about this. Money is money and fun is fun. If you want to pay for fun then do so.

Accuse who? Is this not an open forum for discussing stuff?

[Borja]

Spoiler (Click to View)

(2016-09-26 18:42)Juntu Wrote:  RDSR should be ashamed of trying to accuse and make stupid comments about this.

We also have a web forum, with a server, and we know that there is some things to pay.
What ppl is asking its for know what are they paying for.

Also, we didnt acusse anyone, neither Rossi and me did. I did a sugesstion, anything else, its an open forum/world wich allows u to share your opinion with respect about the things.

Thanks,
Borja.

[Juntu]

Your forum and/or website is not comparable to anything TC does with traffic, quality or in any other measurement. It is not hard to understand. And what do you get if you donate? You get to enjoy as you always did, feeling happy that you helped.

[[TC-R] Sam]

Oh no, how dare they provide you with a free quality service, HOW DARE THEY!

Shame on you guys, seriously.

[[TC-R] Renegade]

All we wanted was our stance to be clear before we got sidetracked. I don't see how the new system is in any way a problem to anyone? TC cannot be paid for by just one or two people for the rest of it's life. Donations have always been a thing, now it's just a bit more important since the donations have died down a little. Running a server is not cheap and even if it were possible to migrate to something even slightly cheaper, actually moving all of the data over and setting up and installing everything again would be a hell of a lot of hassle. The servers that we rent at the moment do the best job possible and it's not worth moving anywhere else.

Like it is said above, if you don't want adverts, pay £5 a year, that's less than 1.3 pence per day to help cover the costs. Or you could continue to use ad-blocker.

Some people are basically saying "how dare we not offer a free service, our own time, our own money to host multiple different services. it's outrageous that we would not offer everything we do for free. How dare we ask for help."

Nobody is forcing you to donate, nobody is forcing you to see the adds. But how is it fair that Pete, Elmo & Chuck pay the server bills and spend their own time developing the insim further as volunteers? They are taking time out of their own lives to bring you guys this free service. I honestly cannot understand the problem.

[Paulius]

quick question: About ads, is it worth? I mean you get atleast 10€ for 100views? Its not annying or anything, im just curiuos.

[Borja]

(2016-09-26 18:48)Renegade Wrote:  Nobody is forcing you to donate, nobody is forcing you to see the adds. But how is it fair that Pete, Elmo & Chuck pay the server bills and spend their own time developing the insim further as volunteers? They are taking time out of their own lives to bring you guys this free service. I honestly cannot understand the problem.

There is no problem, or I dont see it.

Its understable that maybe when everythings starts, they didnt though that this will go for that long and will not reach the reputation that TC have, and now, they need our help as we always need of them(admins and InSim develop.)

[SO•Audiojack]

Without someone paying the bills, you wouldn't even have this platform to voice these silly opinions.

I'd like to thank the management for choosing an ad service and placement that is very reasonable. I don't see them as a nuisance at all like on many other websites.

[Tingle]

I'd be curious to know whether or not affiliate teams donate for their affiliate status? Seeing as the LFS presence for most of these teams seems to rely solely on [TC].

[Warped]

Concerning some of the replies in this thread, it is outstanding how many numbskulled people the world has to offer. I am personally proud of these people, the RDSR guys, who dare to express their opinion.

As for Pete's clarification, thanks. That's an informative package of information. Literally everything I, and maybe others, was asking for. Cheers.

[[TC]►Frozen◄]

Funny to see how people still believe in the 1 euro hosting. Its like buying a racing wheel in a euro shopper. It runs, yes, for how long and how good is the second thing. If you really believe a community like TC in a lfs server hosting like lfs.net offers you are quite wrong.

On an easy look I believe I can safely say that the costs a year are surely (if not approximate) around 450 pounds if not more which is ~550 euros a year.

So everyone did basic maths here. The amount above is not even covered by having 10 premium supporters (15 pounds or more). So imagine what the remaining costs are after asking for help. You surely have to rethink whether they earn anything out of this or not after reading what I wrote.

I believe that the least thing we can do after (many of us) being around for 5 years is help the community you play at when needed. If you are not open for that, or cant do it due to your financial situation, fine, but dont put the blame on them.

[Toni]

(2016-09-26 19:40)Tingle Wrote:  I'd be curious to know whether or not affiliate teams donate for their affiliate status? Seeing as the LFS presence for most of these teams seems to rely solely on [TC].

Atleast when i was leading CSR we didnt really "pay" for our affiliation, but some of the members sent small donations to keep the server running.

[◄Chuck►]

If you want to provide some professional service, you need professional hardware and a professional service provider. If you think this is just a game, then you just see the marquee, but in the background, it's a fully mature IT infrastructure working.
Cause this is what it takes, if you want to provide a 24/7 online service.
We had several service providers in the past, but many of you know, none of them were capable to handle ddos attacks, which we had really a LOT. Back in 2013 we were offline for several weeks cause the provider suspended the server due to enduring attacks.

From that point of view, we are more than happy that we have finally found a provider that is not only capable of working under such conditions but also offer this at a very reasonable price. Just search for yourself for a ddos protected dedicated server, you'd be surprised. 200 Euro/month is considered cheap in this segment.

Elmo has outlined our requirements pretty well and several numbers were mentioned. I am adding one (in case you'r familiar sql servers): Our sql server processes >55.3 queries every second (long term average, not peak!) So just that you get an impression about the data volume we're moving.

[[TC] Viper]

I can't believe the attitudes of some people, very sub par.
I'm proud that my donation helps relieve some of the pressure from [TC]'s shoulders. [TC]'s wallet isn't infinitely deep so they are using the generated traffic to help fund their hardware, etc, etc, which is a really smart move.

Suggesting to downgrade servers to make donations cheaper? How absurd. Please, do brain.

I won't go as far as to say "shame" on some of you, but I will say that I'm disappointed in some peoples attitudes. Hopefully natural selection deals with you lot swiftly.

Here's another £10 [TC]!

Have a great day, guys!

[Borja]

I can imagine Elmo, Pete, Chuck (and other members of TC) working for pay our funny. Not sure how they are enjoying to do this.

Just simple math by checking how much hours do you play on tc and caculate which is the price by hour. On my case, 15GBP/695hrs=0.02GBP. It worth to be payed for my daily use.


By the way, Im premium supoorter!

[[TC]►Dizzle◄]

(2016-09-26 18:47)Sam Wrote:  Oh no, how dare they provide you with a free quality service, HOW DARE THEY!

Shame on you guys, seriously.

+1


I cant be bothered to scroll up and see who said it but, even the most expensive servers fail. Everything fails sometimes and 99% of the time we do not have server issues.

If you just cant afford to donate then dont. Continue your life, we will be fine.