HRWiki talk:2005 Fall Fundraising Drive

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Revision as of 19:58, 2 November 2005 by JoeyDay (Talk | contribs)
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Sitenotice text

Here's the sitenotice I plan to put up on Monday:

The Homestar Runner Wiki needs your help in its 2005 Fall Pledge Drive.
US$0 has been raised toward our goal of US$2,000. Thank you for your generosity!

What do you think? — wikisig.gif Joey (talk·edits) 19:03, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Liking it. Reminds me of the Wikimedia Foundation fundrasier notice the other month. — Lapper (talk) 20:45, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
That's 'cause I ripped it off from them. :) — wikisig.gif Joey (talk·edits) 22:35, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Hooray for pledge drives!

Hooray for pledge drives! Too bad it's impossible for me to donate. Ah well. (But it looks kind of weird for the "Thanks you for your generosity" message to be there when it says $0 has been donated. Maybe you should add that after you get a donation towards it.) - Joshua 16:38, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

Oh anybody can donate. Even if it means putting a penny in an envelope and mailing it to JoeyDay. :) Thunderbird 03:10, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

I donated $5.50 but it still says $0 has been raised... is that because it is a daily update kinda thing? -Jenny 04:40, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, we have to go in and check the account and then manually do everything to update the numbers over here. It takes a short while. Thanks for waiting patiently. -- Tom 04:44, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
Oh ok, I just didn't want you to have to have zero up there. Well, use the remainder of my paycheck wisely! (I spent the rest at ValleyCon) ;) -Jenny 04:52, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

I wish I could send money, but my parents won't let me. I would if I could, though. E-102

Server cost

I'd just like to comment on the server cost. And well.. over 200 a month?? Most entry servers are $99 monthly, and perhaps you guys could even share a server with someone else, which splits the costs. If you guys are getting a fully managed server, then that would sorta explain the costs, but some wiki users probally have experience with linux webservers, and I personally know a few people who would be totally willing to help out with setting up servers and manage them, etc. Generally, switching from shared hosting to dedicated, you shouldn't be jumping to a high-end $250 server, a entry $99 server works just as fine for a site like this. I seriously suggest you shop around, check out places like webhostingtalk.com, and I personally suggest you check out sagonet.com for servers [they even host homestarrunner.com! See the H*R FAQ]. They have dedicated servers [in their bargin servers section] for less then $80 a month, and they work great [I've been with them for 2-3 months before, switched later because I didn't need a dedicated server anymore]. I do suggest that you guys reconsider this and get a less costly server, you don't need something high-end or anything over $150 for a site like this. Just trying to save the wiki [and donaters] some money, and not bothering to log in, 208.31.154.102 16:13, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment. We actually shopped around quite a bit before settling where we did. Most entry-level servers have Celerons with low amounts of memory that simply wouldn't handle the CPU load we push through this server. MediaWiki is very heavy on PHP and MySQL. Every single page on the site loads dynamically, completely unlike HomestarRunner.com, which is purely static. The Chaps probably need a lot of bandwidth to serve the Flash files, but since Apache's the only thing hitting the CPU, they're probably fine running on a Celeron (though I really have no idea what their setup is like). There's a lot of caching and other things MediaWiki does to try and reduce CPU load, but we've learned the hard way (server crashing three times a day on average) that we need to have at least a Xeon (dual-core) with 2 GB of memory. That puts us in the high end of the market. Cory, the owner of Goleman Networks, is a good friend of mine. He shaved quite a bit off his usual price for a dedicated server to help us out. Plus, he is doing a fair amount of server management for us. None of our current admins have the experience or the know-how to do what Cory does, though Cory has been training me on how to do a lot of stuff on my own. There may be the possibility in the future of reducing the cost if I can take full responsibility for server maintenance. As for your suggestion of sharing the server with others, that's exactly what we're going to be doing once we open FellowSites, our new hosting service. We hope to recoup a good chunk of change from that endeavor. I feel confident we've done the right thing in terms of trying to minimize the financial burden for our supporters. If we could've saved money doing this any other way, we would have. — wikisig.gif Joey (talk·edits) 17:09, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
Alright, thanks for explaining. I have ran a MediaWiki on my [Windows] server and it seemed to have run pretty well, though yes I've noticed it to be sluggish. I was able to speed it up quite a bit using mySQL query caching and a program called Zend Optimizer. I also did a few tricks setting cache headers on mostly non-dynamic things such as images and CSS so it would get most browsers to cache the images without checking for updates on them, although I don't know how to do that in apache [I would suspect it would be relatively easy however]. And, I beleave that's all the tips I have for ya, thanks. - Mick -aka- 68.84.11.148 23:14, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Math

Yeah, so, I'm really bad at it. :) — wikisig.gif Joey (talk·edits) 02:40, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Is that an explanation for the drop from $810 to $785?? :) Stu
Or is it due to the PayPal fees being factored out? — User:ACupOfCoffee@ 18:50, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
This message was meant for It's dot com, and he replied to it in the IRC channel. It was partly because my totals were off, but more in reference to how I had miscalculated the percentages on the pledge-o-meter (see this edit and this subsequent edit). The miscalculation in the drive total was from my Excel spreadsheet formula leftover from our last drive. The formula simply totals the transactions starting at the cell of the first pledge drive donation. Last year we made a $49.99 payment right in the middle of the drive, so I had tweaked my formula to compensate for that payment. This year, I updated the formula so it started at the correct cell, but forgot to remove the +$49.99. So, all my totals up until recently were off by $50. — wikisig.gif Joey (talk·edits) 19:58, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
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