GC Status and pseudo-wind-down

[Flitterkill]

Over the last year, since last April 2022, excluding anyone that might have randomly paypaled me personally and not through GC, income was $225. That is through today, April 28th, 2023. My thanks to those of you throwing the occasional $10 donation through the storefront. If it were not for those, that $225 would be a good chunk less. Yes - that $225 includes random donations. That's how little income GC is getting now. And props to the perp who threw $30 my way earlier this month when I said the server bill was coming due. That was today, and it was appreciated. And yes, that $30 is included in that yearly total above.

There are 6 server admins, and one of them might just be flagged as an admin. 

There are 28 GC members. A good many of them are just bugged and never got reverted once their membership expired. If I go through that lot, it will be less than 20.

Financially I've been carrying the bulk of the $800+ a year overall-bill (minus the above amount) for, well, a looong time. This covers forum software, web server, game server, domain renewals, etc. I don't mind "in general", but this is not the only org where I've been picking up the slack like this and you add all those numbers up times x-number of years and I've been doing myself no favors to put it bluntly - and the last GC game I played here was UT3 so... yep. (Side-note: Epic is finally getting around to nuking the online-server browser stuff for all the UT line, including the abandoned UT4 stuff. Memories... I guess there is always watching YouTube clips)

Archer and cc have been jamming the L4D2 server stuff as they can. Successfully? I dunno. There is a lot of legacy stuff long since kept up-to-date so it's tough sledding. My thanks to him, Maestro, and all the rest giving it the ol' college try.

It's been well over a decade since self-hosted servers and groups forming around them have been a thing. The bulk of the gaming community has moved on to Discord, Reddit, and live-service games. L4D2 is one of those that has a bit of a hold on people (and then of course CSGO) but that's it. It's been dead here for years, and honestly, even a decade plus ago when I was begging for people to start other servers and do anything they wanted (we had money then), there were literally no takers - ever. The gaming world had already moved on.

All that said, the following will be happening in the near-ish future - by the end of July 2023 when the next server bill hits:

1) The virtual dedicated server will be reverted to TWO (one?) hosted L4D2 instances. One can be used as a test bed, the other as the live main server. We have not used the VDS to it's potential for, well, years. No sense paying for it. This will mean, other than maybe an ip address change, nothing over all. Just need to move the custom stuff over and that's that. The actual underlying server stuff, the way we work with them, will not change one iota (our VDS was just an overlay on NFO hosted servers anyways letting us spin them up instead of buying them one at a time through NFO). Doing this saves $130+ a year. If I could convince you L4D2'rs to just live with the one server and eat all the debugging and dev on it - which is not a bad idea given that daytime it is really dead... - the server itself would be a measly $100 a year. 

2) A HARD sweep through the member and admin roles. Anyone not paid, gets reset to forum member. Server reserves will be set to match as well.

3) Revert this domain name from gamrs.co to gamerscoalition.com. gamrs.co was my idea and it popped right when everything faded around here. I got other uses for this domain now. gcftw.com still remains as an option as well (not giving the domains up though I might let the last of the fragfestohio domains lapse or see if Fatty wants to take it over)

4) Those of you (like... maybe 4 people actively using it) with @gamerscoalition.com email addresses rest easy. That's not going away until Google forces everyone to start paying on these legacies. They tried a year ago and walked it back for people just using it for group or non-business type stuff - which is us. I've been using an email address here as one of my primaries for eons, so this includes me as well. 

5) Forums here will get stream-lined and archived in places. I know some people pop in every few years for nostalgia purposes. There are some legitimately good memories here. But the truth is, much like the Babylon 5 station, eventually people and trends move on and the place is just a hazard to navigation. Spending a ton on forum renewal software when no one is using it is kinda silly. What I will attempt to do, as I actually hold many different licenses to this software package for other sites, is slide us over to one of those that isn't the entire suite (which is now $300/year) and just stick us on one of my licenses that is just the forums and commerce which will cut that down to probably half that. I'm not interested in shutting everything down, but clean it up and set it up for just you L4D2'rs and bury the rest out of the way for people to read when they feel old.

6) The web server here does not expire until June 2024. So, over a year from now. When that time comes, I'll either renew on a cheaper package (its actually pretty cheap already) or I'll piggy-back this site on one of my other organization's servers.

------------------------------------------------

Any questions or vague mutterings in my direction you can respond here but comms are always open on Steam which is the best way to hit me up - it's just Flitterkill as it has always been - if you have trouble finding me, steam at maestro and he can fold you over to me.

[looneypumpkin]

Thanks for your continued work on the server FK, Maestro and archer.  I'm glad to see it isn't going away. I think one server is better than none especially at that much savings. If there's dedicated "test time" when it's dead it'll be just fine. I'd just say no weekends during prime time obviously.

I hope to get back into action sometime. I'm still technically an admin but haven't done much of anything in server since I had my 2nd child. I have done a few resets, bans, grabbed commands for others via PM. I think for my mental health I need to get back into it but need to find the time. When is the server most busy lately? My thing is it is hard to play anything multiplayer with my house being a madhouse, children getting into things and all the rest. Oh well. 

 

[MPG1770]

I'd thought I would be able to donate by now, but there are serious issues going on over this side of the pond that's making it impossible for me to do that atm - I'm going through a court case right now - I lived in Atlanta for 7yrs - 2000 to 2007 - according to the DWP (Department of Works and Pensions) - I owe them almost $15K in taxes for that period and they have now determined that that money is going to be automatically taken away from me - so I'm left with only $55 per week to live on - 25yrs teaching, traveling the world doing endless gigs, and now with Brexpoop, I very must doubt my financial state is not going to improve as yet.  I'm on the scrap-heap, along with 400,000 freelance artists - there doesn't seem to be an escape from this financial poop-state of affairs, thanks you wanker Brexpoopters & a 'violent expletive' towards you Ametican/Irish supporters who have never been to Ireland - so go eff yourself - cus you guys are still a disdain and a blot on the peace-process - please God, if you ever existed - destroy BREXIT - what a monumental failure in 2016 these UK nobs voted for is killing us - DEMOCIDE.  Was hoping for this new king to be assassinated - but whatever, he ain't got long to live - but that's another story.