Can you help?

completely unrelated, but what on earth would you do without the quote function here?

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Heh. Can’t remember what I did on the old forum. Ya best have a look sooner rather than later if you want to check before sean presses the big red button!

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Not sure about the articles and reviews. But if it makes sense financially then bin the old forum without hesitation.

Do hesitate!

Ask yourself: Am I sitting on a publishing goldmine?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Im-Office-Worker-Michael-Häne/dp/1471627829/

:upside_down_face:

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The answer to this is 100% yes. Either by running a spider against everything and re-uploading as-is on something like AWS, Google Cloud or Azure as a static site, or by taking a dump of the database, piecing together the important tables again and normalising it into something more workable/cheaper (There’s no doubt a lot of redundant stuff). As it’s largely articles, a document centric database rather than an SQL one may make sense and be considerably cheaper to run. Obviously, without having full access to everything and knowing what Sean’s server bills are currently like it’s difficult to know exactly how much they could come down by or how long it would take and whether it’s worth doing the actual work.

The real question for me is how does Sean and/or the community do it?

Obviously paying for dev time is out - Sean’s been understandably clear about this before - but (and I floated this once before to very little reception), I honestly feel like it’s something that the community could help with. There’s quite a few Software professionals here, and no doubt some hobbyists as well, so if people were up for it then we could offer Sean our time to see what we collectively think is a way forward beyond nuking the entire thing. We may not collectively be able to solve the problem in an ideal way, but many heads means collectively we would come up with a range of possible ideas for keeping the stuff Sean wants to keep online at a reduced cost, and maybe even (if it’s not too big a job) donate some time towards making the necessary changes.

If @Twinkletoes and team were able to start a record label between them, I honestly don’t think it’s beyond the wit of those of us with the necessary skills to help out communally here. Of course, what I don’t know is if there’s enough of us with enough time, skills and willpower collectively to solve the problem (I could easily name at least half a dozen people with coding skills, but that doesn’t mean they could necessarily help for many reasons), nor whether it’s something Sean would be comfortable with exploring. I would be up for helping as part of a group personally, but it’s going to take more than just a bit of my spare time to solve DiS’s woes.

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I am much more knowledgeable about SQL than labels and would be happy to do some free dev work

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Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has made a donation so far. You’ve turned my frown into a clown grin.

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I did put the fixed costs above. It varies depending on how much the gap is between ad revenue and the costs.

have donated :blush:

i also just want to say that i would be incredibly sad if the old boards and old site disappeared. to pick a random example i used to live with someone and mentioned DiS to him. he surprised me by saying oh i love those guys, they gave me a good review. he’d released something ( but it got picked up and given a pretty good score - i imagine someone in his position would be quite sad if the site did get nuked

Similarly, we suspect Beady Eye would be happy :wink:

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Looks like you landed the biggie after all!

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Done. Given the time (and pleasure) I get from DiS, it’s the least I can do (now payday has finally come around again).

If anyone else thinks I’m making up how much the server costs are, here are just two of last month’s invoices

https://twitter.com/drownedinsound/status/1060152390802915328?s=21

That was my first thought.

Thought I remembered them getting favourable coverage. Weirds

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He was being a right prick, de-escalation or not.

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It’s very odd. I’m friends with his wife. She co-hosted one of our Soho Radio shows (which we don’t get paid for) and has done some days freelancing for me at the BBC.

Just giving this a pre-weekend bump. Thanks again to everyone who made a contribution, it means a lot.

We’re nearing 3k on our Facebook fundraiser. Thank you to everyone who has donated there or via PayPal. This really helps get us out of a pickle. It buys us not just time but hopefully we can keep DiS afloat into 2019 and beyond Redirecting...

Thinking of ideas of things we can do next year to radically lower costs and shift up the value of what we do.

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