How much is ModPlug Central worth to YOU?

[Harbinger]

You're probably right, esp. for money going to Europe. But there's accountability. I can trace a USPS money order, stop it, stop its payment, and even insure it... I don't know who's running PayPal, and when it comes down to it, neither does 99% of their customers.

We need more general distrust of the internet...

[Saga Musix]

You're probably right, esp. for money going to Europe. But there's accountability. I can trace a USPS money order, stop it, stop its payment, and even insure it... I don't know who's running PayPal, and when it comes down to it, neither does 99% of their customers.

PayPal is run by eBay. Do you know the USPS guys personally? And if no, why differentiate between PayPal and USPS _that_ way?

[Rakib]

Make a paypal account, send the 20$ to the paypal account, from the paypal account you transfer to 20$ to JoJo's paypal account.

[Harbinger]

PayPal is run by eBay. Do you know the USPS guys personally? And if no, why differentiate between PayPal and USPS _that_ way?

I don't know any postmen, but i know they exist. If i send money, it's got to be somewhere! The USPS has an extensive tracing ability for their mail (at least if you register the envelope). They can determine who took the envelope from me, what truck it went on, who signed for it.
With PayPal, there is NO ACCOUNTABILITY. And with computer hacking as it is, i dare not enter my CC# in any field that links to the internet. If you trust virtual reality, be my guest...

Oh BTW, don't use eBay as your defense. Because of them and FilePlanet, i have to maintain a separate private email account. I have never dealt with a website more trouble than eBay.

[Saga Musix]

I don't know about you, but I'd rather trust electronic transfer of money than the postal way; Money and other valuable things sent via (real life) mail tend to get stolen here often enough. On the other hand, I've never heard of money being stolen through a bank transfer, and PayPal does nothing more than bank transfers.

Oh BTW, don't use eBay as your defense.

My point is that it's a fairly big and well-known company - if they were stealing people's money sent through PayPal transfers, they'd be gone pretty soon (the transaction fee is another thing, though...).

[Harbinger]

I don't want to argue the point, especially since you and i live under two different postal systems.  I get it -- you're just not as paranoid as i am.

I wouldn't accuse eBay of stealing, but their lack of security is the problem. But i get your point. I hope you got mine..

[g]

I'm pretty sure (no link or reference, sorry about that) the absolute majority of credit card frauds are caused by physical access to credit cards or skimming.

On another note, several banks issue "virtual" debit cards which means you can create a debit card virtually, and limit it to a certain time period and amount. The money is then deducted from your "real" credit/debit card.

[Saga Musix]

So thanks to our generous donors, we are a couple of steps closer to the original goal: The forums, the german wiki and the website are already hosted on our own server. The english wiki, the download section and a bugtracker will hopefully follow very soon. There is also an icecast server ready for streaming the best of demoscene music (not as a permanent radio, though, there are already many good demoscene radios available; i rather think of some "radio shows" every now and then) and a tool for hosting compos (mostly written for the OHCs held on IRC, but it can be used for any kind of compo).
Big thanks again to our donors!

[Saga Musix]

And we're at this certain point again. I have just paid another server bill and we're left with exactly 25 euro cents worth of donations. The next payment is due in exactly three months (the server is rented per quarter year), and I guess I should start asking for donations early since the amount of donations over the year has not been very great (exactly zero to be precise).

In retrospect over the last nine months, I can say that we have got a rather stable server for the (relatively) little money we pay, and everything (apart from some mostly minor hickups) has been running very smooth and trouble-free. There have been some outages, but hey, we're paying for 99.6% uptime per year (that's about 36 hours downtime per year), and not something like 99.99%. The work invested in moving the forum and the main site, as well as creating a bug tracker has been well worth it in my opinion, and I think most of you can agree with that. Now of course I'm quite behind my schedule (mostly due to me being busy at university), but all the other features left (wiki, download site) are still in progress and should go online this year. The only reason why there is no new English wiki yet is actually because our custom pattern viewer extension for MediaWiki does not work together with the PediaPress plugin for creating ODF/PDF exports of the wiki, and I'd like to see this functional before copying the manual over there and then realizing that it will look like crap when being printed to PDF because the pattern export is broken.

[KrazyKatz]

Hey Jojo,

-Can you send a short list, of what the costs have been for the year and what we're getting for them. By making it transparent, maybe someone can see if anyone knows of better deals.
-Where can I send my Paypal donation?

Thanks

[Saga Musix]

The server costs are €23.97 per quarter (including a free domain which happens to be openmpt.org), plus there was a one-time €10 setup fee - for the last year, this is a total of €105.88. For the next years, the total running costs per year will be €95.88.
For information on how to donate, see the donation page.

Can you send a short list, of what the costs have been for the year and what we're getting for them.

Basically you get everything that can be seen on openmpt.org - currently this is the main site, the forum, the German OpenMPT wiki, the bug tracker, the automatic update check and some in-development and planned stuff mentioned before (English wiki, download site, maybe also the code repository at some point).

[Rakib]

Maybe add a donation button on the about window in modplug?

[jmkz]

I used to have a website at http://www.webhostingpad.com/ (US) and there are very good prices. Maybe can be an alternative, the payment is low for a long term service. Check if it can be an alternative to host OpenMPT website.

[LPChip]

I have my website hosted in the US and in the Netherlands. These give me a shared webhosting for 5$/m or less. If we wanted shared webhosting, we would've taken that, but we do prefer a dedicated server, so we can install things like our own SVN server.

[Saga Musix]

Web hosting is not the same thing as a web server. Web hosting is basically: You have some webspace, maybe php and mysql, and you can upload files, and that's it. That's not enough for openmpt.org - we need f.e. shell access, and you don't get something like that from cheap web hosters - let alone full control over the server. The server this site is currently running on has everything we need. And shared webhosting is really bad for larger sites (which openmpt.org should eventually become again).