In short: If you like these forums and would love them to continue to exist, please consider making a small contribution each month toward their upkeep here https://ko-fi.com/drownedinsound
Hello everyone,
As you may have heard, on July 2nd 2023, Drowned in Sound’s forums moved across to a self-hosted server solution.
This means very little on the frontend to your experience but behind the scenes it means that we’re no longer staring down the barrel of £600+ per month to keep the conversation flowing
Why was it so much before? Because we were on Discourse’s Enterprise package due to the volume of traffic.
It’s now estimated to be more like £52 per month or £600-700 per year.
I say estimated, because there’s a chance we will need more server storage or additional resources to keep things online or have somehow overlooked something expensive, which we will continue to monitor and update you on.
Some months people might not be able to contribute, so the amount per month may fluctuate and any overage we can discuss if it goes into the rainy day fund or toward other admin-y bits.
There are around 350 regulars on these forums and although we know not everyone can contribute. If you would like to pay it forward, you can slip the price of a pint into our - ahem! - ‘kofi pot’ each month to cover those who can’t afford it, it’s much appreciated.
There’s more info and a breakdown of costs on the fundraiser page here https://ko-fi.com/drownedinsound
If you’re already making a contribution through PayPal or Patreon, that’s fantastic but it would be a little more streamlined and save some admin if you moved it over to Kofi, which goes straight into the CCCLX Music LTD’s PayPal (that’s my management and consultancy company, to save forming a new company and the added cost of accounting and liability), which is administering all the costs and has already paid the bill for 12 months of FastHosts.
Hope that all makes sense and isn’t too TL;DR. Please let me know if you have any queries.
I want to say a massive thank you to @megalithicrock for volunteering his time to do the lion’s share of the server move, it has been far more of an ordeal than it shoulda been and we all owe him a debt of gratitude and many pints. Also big thank you to @zeal and @profk for all their ongoing help and insights, and all the other community members who chipped in and helped this transition happen. And thanks too to @whiterussian for all the assistance with comms and being copied into what are not the most exciting DMs… conversations get locked at 500 messages, who knew?!
Thank you to all of you in advance for your continued support and for making these forums the wonderful online outpost that they’ve become over the last 23 years.
Cheers,
Sean
–JAG?–
p.s. many hours go in behind the scenes to keep things going and I’ve covered the shortfall of server costs on many occasions over the years, so if you’d like to support my time that goes into DiS, you could grab something on our independent label here http://drownedinsound.bandcamp.com/ and/or there’s a newsletter + podcast that you can subscribe to and support over on Substack ahead of plans to bring back the editorial in some form at some point in the not so distant future https://drownedinsound.substack.com/ (still figuring out what the premium offering for the newsletter might be, but getting closer to figuring that out… ideas as always are welcomed!)
–JAG ENDS–
