Site upgraded, funding, and the future

[Pleeb]

Hey everyone.  I just upgraded the servers and upgraded to the latest version of Invision Community.  There's some quick things I wanted to mention though.

 

Once Invision switches to version 5, they're going to raise their prices from $80/yr to $200/yr (about $7/month to $17/month).  Version 5 is also a major overhaul and looks more similar to Discourse.  We don't have to switch to v5 though, we can keep using v4 until they stop supporting it (v5 is still in beta), but we won't be able to keep our current license once that switch happen and we are out of support.

 

We've used Invision Community for a bit over 5 years now, and got a lot out of it.  I really hope to keep trying to just have it on life support as long as I can.  I'm frustrated though, as in the last year or so they've gotten rid of the community marketplace which had one of the few plugins that I actually relied on (Multiaccount).  If anyone knows of a forum software that has multi-account built in, please let me know.

 

For now, I'm just going to coast, but I'm also looking for other potential forum software.  If you know of any, please also let me know.

 

With that being said, I wanted to mention something else regarding the funding...  The monthly expenses to run the site right now are $37/month ($29 of that is hosting, the rest is saving for invision, the domain, etc).  The total monthly donations are about $19/month so the rest comes out-of-pocket.

 

If you've gotten a lot out of .info and you can afford it (and only if you can afford it), I would very much appreciate it if you could donate, either via Patreon, PayPal, or Buying Merch (the merch doesn't pay .info much though, but the mug and stuff is cool).

 

https://www.tulpa.info/donate/

 

If you do donate, then I can also give you the Patron role on the forums, just let me know in Talk To Staff.

 

Anything that's donated goes 100% into the site.  If incoming donations are more than the cost of the site, the money goes into back-purchasing credit so the site will remain online even if funding stops.  Since we do have a lot of hosting credit the lights will stay on which is why I haven't brought this up before, but I did want to take the time to mention it at least.

 

Thanks!

 

Pleeb.

[Pleeb]

For those who've donated since this announcement, as well as the Patrons who have been donating all of these years, THANK YOU SO MUCH