First off, thank you to
@otis for leading the fund raising efforts for this site this past year. Today I got a bill for $650 to renew the domain. This is just one annual fee that I pay regularly to keep this site going. There are many fees for software, license/subscriptions, software tech support and other development beyond my own time.
I have always wanted to keep this a true community site and not charge anyone. When I first started this site, I was a small business owner and business was booming. It was so good that I had my employees custom building software that was unique to our community. The amount of manhours that went into it in the early years, is astronomical. In addition to that I was doing data entry but also had some awesome volunteers like
@espken and
@MCNPA doing an amazing amount of data entry like complete stats for all games and all players going back to the early 1900s as well as doing live updates to game scores and box scores to grow the larger database, year after year. Nobody else was doing anything like this.
I have not had a staff to rely upon for about 15 years now. I've been maintaining the site solo and when I hit some obstacle that I cannot tackle, I hire a contractor.
I am grateful to the men who have spent so much time on here volunteering for over quarter century!
@espken still does database updates and would probably do more except that I have been the bottleneck in trying to keep the database tech upgraded over the years.
@Knight is super diligent in keeping the game threads established and organized.
@ohiofan often volunteers to do some of the less pleasant moderation tasks and I am regularly, even after all of these years, shocked that
these accomplished men who surely have a lot better things to do, volunteer their time often on a daily basis. With the passing of SJUFAN2 I have felt especially inadequate in expressing this gratitude to these men.
When we transitioned over to this new site last March/April,
@otis asked for $upport. And then at the end of the year he made another appeal. And before that a few members had made donations over the years and a select few had become monthly donors. Often times when a donation has been made, the donor includes a note thanking me! Again, I feel inadequate to express my gratitude.
BADGES:
These thing have been on my mind and I've been working on and slowly implementing some new features. The site now includes some badges to recognize members for some special contribution or otherwise and there will be ongoing awards of these badges in different categories and for different reasons.
For those of you who have made a donation in 2022, you will now have a badge recognizing this on your profile page and within the profile box on your forum posts. Another badge will recognize 2023 donors and there are some other new badges being implemented like the very cool and exclusive Moderator badge. What about some recognition for
@paultzman for the amazing contributions to the recruiting news and update? It is long and woefully overdue.
Some of you that made a donation, indicated on the donor form that you wanted it to be Anonymous. So if you did that, I removed you from the badge awards. However there may also be some cases where you would like the badge and you can just contact me via private message (the little mail icon) or click on my username:
@Red.Fans There were some donors who used email addresses that were different from the email they use for their account here. So I tried matching up some of these manually but I may have missed some.
The donations are processed by donorbox which is a trusted 3rd party organization that does the same for organizations like Habitat for Humanity. There is a link in the main menu "Contribute" which goes to Otis' appeal but I will probably update that and you can also click direct:
Support red.fans
donorbox.org
Thank you again,
Paul
, I’d be more inclined to donate.
