Sign-up on the T-Board just requires a valid e-mail address, I think, like almost every other site there is. Pretty basic, standard Internet stuff. It's not like we're doing a background check. Being cautious about giving out information is good, but that's why you have an "Internet" e-mail address that's different from your "real life" e-mail address, with no real personal information attached. {= )

Though, I'm not sure you're actually talking about that. So, what are you talking about?

~Neshomeh

I wonder if there's a way to set up a PayPal account or something that a few of us (chiefly the admins) would have access to, that those of us in a position to do so could set up autopayments to, and that anyone could drop a tip to if they felt like it. "Buy our Board admins a coffee!" sort of thing. {= )

Alternatively, we could make like public radio and do a pledge drive yearly or as needed. That way, contributing period to period would be totally flexible. Situations can change, after all.

All that said, I'm not personally opposed to something like Google ads, and could even be persuaded to make a point of clicking on one occasionally if that's all it would take to fund the Board.

~Neshomeh

P.S. doc, I know how you eat, please spend the $10 a month on some vegetables. {= P

Yeah, running off a Pi would be nice, but last I checked T-Board tends to grind even on its current setup under a heavy workload. This could probably be fixed (i dunno), but it hasn't been yet. To make matters worse, Rails is generally just very expensive RAM and computation-wise (although not as bad as it once was: Twitter used to use a frankly insane amount of RAM with each request because Rails would fire a large number of exceptions as part of normal operation (falling off the end of a list while iterating, deliberately, and then just catching the exception)).

So, hosting. EC2 is the standard, and it's pretty cheap on an hourly basis, as is Amazon's associated storage. Thing is, of course, that we're running over years and stuff. That adds up. However, assuming PGSQL and Ruby don't do anything stupid, the compute time we use in a given year will be a lot less than a year's worth of compute: in theory, they ought to be spending most of their time waiting for requests, that is, doing nothing. In light of this, I suspect we could comfortably run off a T2 small, or maybe even a micro, which costs a few cents per hour. Storage is ten cents per GB per month. I suspect $10 a month would cover us. Take that with a grain of salt: I'm not an admin. So we're probably looking at $15-20 a month, maybe? Probably less? Plus DNS costs, unless we get a free subdomain off someone (quite a number of services offer that).

Seriously take this with a grain of salt. I got all of this by squinting at EC2's website and guessing.

If I had a server or the equipment I'd definitely volunteer to set one up, but that would require me going out to buy things for it and I can't really do that right now. I doubt the T-board would crash most servers (that are set up decently), as it's primarily text-based and that usually doesn't take up that much processor power.

Anyhow. I could definitely help pay for hosting. I would be okay with ads, but I rarely click on them and intermittently use adblock so yeah.