New Fundraiser: D Forums Server

[Mike Parker]

One of the options we were considering for a new fundraising 
campaign was raising money for Vladimir's continuing efforts on 
the forums. He's been maintaining them, and covering the server, 
without any compensation since the beginning. The recent thread 
about forum outages pushed all other considerations aside: it's 
time to support Vladimir.

However, being the awesome guy he is, he insisted we only help 
out in covering the server costs. So that's what we're setting 
out to do with the new campaign.

He has a list of options to improve the forum performance, one of 
which he recently implemented (moving the database to a new 
partition). A new server with more resources and an SSD should 
show an even bigger win. Then he can take the time to do his 
other optimizations at his leisure.

We're asking the community to contribute $2000 to cover the new 
server for one year, with a little bit extra for any incidentals 
that arise. This is a campaign we want to make an annual event so 
that Vladimir never has to pay out of pocket for the server again.

The campaign is available from the menu on the Donate page, but 
you can go straight to it here:

https://www.flipcause.com/secure/cause_pdetails/NDkzNjc=

And if you also want to support Vladimir in the broader work he 
does on all the open source software he puts out, he has a 
Patreon page that is looking pretty empty right now:

https://www.patreon.com/cybershadow

Next month, I'll be launching Round 2 of the PR Manager campaign 
for another three months of PR trimming goodness. We pulled in 
$3,124 from Round 1, so the extra $124 will be used for a head 
start on Round 2.

I'll put all of this in a blog post in the next few days, along 
with some other info.