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2021 Fundraising(and beyond). Please Read! UPDATES!

C'mon folks. This site ain't gonna pay for itself.

For every 10% closer we get to goal, I'll buy whatever alcohol the board decides upon and drink too much of it while posting in the drunk thread on a Friday night. Ever want to make the most masculine man you've ever heard of drink appletini's all night? Here's your chance. :lol:
 
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Okay, all. We're starting to wind up for the season in a number of different ways. Within the next 40 days I'm going to be taking the site down long enough to do a full back-end overhaul (OS, mySQL, PHP, Apache, etc.), finally get that elusive ElastiSearch software added, bridge that to the site through an add-on, upgrade XenForo to 1.5 which will add a lot of new (but optional) features, and FINALLY get the front page in order. I'm dumping WordPress and installing something that's driven by Xenforo itself, so the page will be fresh, dynamic, easy to maintain, and MOST importantly it will drive people into the forum instead of away. Right now we look like a dead or haunted house with a neglected front door, and some people turn away and don't get to discover the creamy middle inside. I immediately regret mixing those metaphors. We are going to drop Pick'Em and Survivor (which never made it out of a testing phase anyway -- the Book isn't going anywhere). These are fun on-site options, but they just don't compare to the free and much more feature-rich alternatives at Yahoo and the like, and I think most people preferred those. We will continue to give banners to game winners, we will continue to run games, we're just streamlining the process and not going to run multiple instances of the same games this year. We'll see how that goes and re-evaluate next year -- we own the software for life.

If you haven't kicked in for the drive, please consider doing so now. Our server admin (affectionately referred to as "The Wolf" for his remarkable on-call clean-up ability) no longer lives just a few miles away from our server. Indeed, he's in Arizona after having left Facebook for an exciting new job, and our server is still right outside Menlo Park, CA (the epicenter of the online world). He's still our Wolf, but he no longer has easy hands on the actual hardware. That complicates things a little bit from a logistical and economic perspective, but overcoming complications make us stronger and more nimble.

This drive is off to the slowest start of any before it, at the same time ads are at an all-time low. That's all okay -- NONE of what I described above is contingent upon bringing in more money. This site has provided for me in some particularly dark and desperate times, and I will always provide for it. But every little bit helps. Note that this is a call to those who already intended to kick in but just haven't yet, and not to those who already have. The timing is good now if it was on your to-do list or if you've been on the fence. Thanks so much to those who already have, you kept the lights on over the Summer and well into the Fall.

It's going to be an exciting season. As I get closer to the work (it's likely to be sometime early August) I'll post some information about the features in 1.5 that will be coming. One that I'm excited about (but few others will be) is the inclusion of two-factor authentication. This is a bigger deal for the site than it is the users, insofar as admins can truly secure their accounts -- but for those of you who like an extra layer of security and are already familiar with Google Authenticator and other alternatives, you may find that welcome news. It will be an option to all, not a requirement. That isn't (at all) the only goodie coming, almost everything that's been asked for has been on a list and I think we're going to be able to satisfy all of that. Far more video embeds, in-line Tweets, Vines, etc., and of course, as discussed above, we will FINALLY have a proper search function that will exceed anything BP has had in its history, and put virtually no strain on the site itself as all (completely different software/process). It's been a long time coming, but we're doing it the *right* way (measure twice, cut once -- even if that takes a few years). Anything I could have done to this point would have come at the cost of site speed and reliability, and that was too heavy a burden.
 
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