Autoshite forum funding

[PrinceRupert]

Sent PP FF!

[Talbot]

On 5/14/2022 at 8:26 AM, Mally said:

All being well, it's now sorted.

It is,  Many thanks!

[myglaren]

I seem to have made a mess of it.

Opted to pay by debit card and it used PayPal anyway, despite being told not to.

[Dyslexic Viking]

Hopefully some money is on the way via PayPal from me.

[Talbot]

On 5/17/2022 at 10:15 AM, myglaren said:

I seem to have made a mess of it.

Opted to pay by debit card and it used PayPal anyway, despite being told not to.

KoFi uses paypal as it's payment handler as far as I can tell, so if you're trying to pay by debit card, it still goes through paypal to do so.  Absolutely not a problem!

[Talbot]

Having left this open for over a week now, a total of £235.20 has been raised, and I want to thank everyone who has donated.  With the previous balance of £(19.93) this leaves the kitty standing at £215.27

There have been invision forum software costs, which I will check up on and update shortly.  However, I think we will be set for May and June hosting costs, so I won't need to open the fundraiser again for at least a couple of months, if not slightly longer.

Many thanks again to all.

[Talbot]

Not updated this in a little while (which was rather the point of leaving the fundraiser open for longer each time) but it's now a bit overdue.  Finances at the moment:

After the Fundraiser in May, we had £215.27.  Costs have been:

June  £80.85
July  £75.97
August £81.02

Total £237.84, meaning the balance at the moment is -(22.57).  It looks very much like the hosting costs have levelled out at "about £80 a month", which given how much everything else has gone up, actually isn't awful.

So, the fundraiser is again open.  As always, the fundraiser can be found here:

https://ko-fi.com/autoshite

Unfortunately, despite KoFi being superbly easy to use, when it transfers balance to Paypal, it's considered a business transaction, so some fees are lost.  On the back of that, if anyone wishes to make a "friends and family" paypal payment directly into the Autoshite Paypal account, that would be most welcomed.  The email address to make a payment to is

[email protected]

However, for anyone making a payment by anything other than paypal, or indeed would prefer not to use friends&family to make the payment that is no issue at all and payments through KoFi are very welcome indeed.  Sending direct by Paypal friends&family is absolutely optional.  But is also welcomed to avoid fees.

I will, as before, leave this open for a while, to allow everyone who uses the forum to see this and contribute if they wish.  With luck, this will again cover the next 3 months or so.

The explanation for the weird email address on page 1.

Many thanks to all contributors, large, small or anything in between.

[Matty]

PayPaled to the email address. Thanks for keeping it going lads and lasses 👍

[Dyslexic Viking]

Sent some via Paypal now.

[PrinceRupert]

Small donation whizzing your way

[PrinceRupert]

Oh no did it too quickly and missed the blurb on ko fi...sorry!

[Cookiesouwest]

Done - to your Paypal

[Erebus]

Done by PayPal. Cheers

[Wibble]

Small donation sent by PayPal

[Rightnider]

I just made a small donation via PayPal. Thanks for your work!

[myglaren]

Is it possible to make a bank transfer and avoid the PayPal fees?

I tried last time with PayPal and it went via the fee-paying option despite me choosing the friends and family option.

[Talbot]

6 hours ago, myglaren said:

Is it possible to make a bank transfer and avoid the PayPal fees?

I tried last time with PayPal and it went via the fee-paying option despite me choosing the friends and family option.

If you want to make a direct bank transfer to me, drop me a PM for my details.  I won't put them on open forum for reasonably obvious reasons!

Friends&Family should be fee-free, but if you'd prefer to bank transfer, no problem.

[666jjp]

Paypal completed

[Timewaster]

Some tokens deposited. 

Thanks to all in the engine room.

[AndyIggs]

Donation made, thanks for keeping a great site going 👍

[privatewire]

Paypal donation made

[AnnoyingPentium]

I put some Internet dosh in the other day via the Ko-Fi as I completely forgot about the PayPal option.

[motorpunk]

On 21/08/2022 at 16:44, Talbot said:

If you want to make a direct bank transfer to me, drop me a PM for my details.  I won't put them on open forum for reasonably obvious reasons!

Friends&Family should be fee-free, but if you'd prefer to bank transfer, no problem.

DM me bank details please 👍

[Asimo]

[808 Estate]

Done thanks.

[richardmorris]

Done ( annual, not monthly!)

[Joey spud]

I've just bunged you tenner via P.P

Keep up the good work chaps.

[Talbot]

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed.  I left this open a fair bit longer than intended, but hopefully it gave everyone who wanted to contribute a chance to do so.  I don't have a total yet, as there has been a couple of payments by bank transfer and I need to add them into the total.  As an estimate, I think we've raised about £300, which is superb and will easily last the next 3-4 months.

So I'll close this off for the time being and stop KoFi payments.

Ta!

[Talbot]

After the Fundraiser in August, we had £294.73
Costs have been:

• September  £83.62
• October  £81.70
• November £85.20

Total £250.52, meaning the balance at the moment is £44.21

The forum software (invision) is up for renewal very soon, which will likely occur during November.  There is also a background issue that means we need to do a server rebuild.  The details are shown below, but there may be some minor interim costs for doing this, mainly data transfer.

As noted elsewhere, we're also now no longer hosting video, so I expect the monthly cost to "soften" a little over the next month or two.  Video had become disproportionate in the amount of space and bandwidth it used, so I expect this will help quite a bit, if only to stop the price going up even more.

So, the fundraiser is again open.  As always, the fundraiser can be found here:

https://ko-fi.com/autoshite
or a Paypal friends and family payment to:
[email protected]

KoFi is superbly easy to use, but when it transfers balance to Paypal, it's considered a business transaction, so some fees are lost.  If anyone wishes to make a "friends and family" paypal payment directly into the Autoshite Paypal account, that would be most welcomed.   It is also possible to make a direct bank transfer, but as this is to my personal account, I'm not going to leave details online.  Please PM me if you would prefer to do this.

I will, as before, leave this open for a while, to allow everyone who uses the forum to see this and contribute if they wish.  With luck, this will again cover the next 3 months or so.

The explanation for the weird email address on page 1.

Many thanks to all contributors, large, small or anything in between.

 

The detail in case anyone is interested:

We need to upgrade to PHP 8.0, which unfortunately isn't supported under Debian, which is what the AS server runs at the moment.  We plan to upgrade to Ubuntu, which will run PHP 8.0.  The easiest way to do this is to set up a new server with Ubuntu and PHP 8.0, then export everything from the old server to the new one, which will of course incurr some data transfer charges.  Once that's done, Autoshite.com will be pointed to the new server, and the old one knocked on the head.  This ensures minimum downtime.  The small additional cost to minimise downtime seems very worthwhile.  The cost of this will be noted once it's done.

[Macscrooge]

Didn’t understand a f@&#ing word of all that techy stuff - but donation sent. 
Keep up the excellent work!