Dear Ganiman, (op updated)

[Odon]

TAJ HAS THE FUCKING GIBSON IN HIS SIG!! HE MUST BE CRASH OVERRIDE/ZERO COOL!

O shi...
HACK THE PLANET! HACK THE PLANET THEY ARE TRASHING OUR RIGHTS! HACK THE PLANET!

[JoOeetheplatypuS]

I don't use this word lightly, I'm not one of those word sluts, but I must say it



EPIC

[Ryko]

Finally

Diiiiiiiiiiiing bitches, call me a prophet.

Edit: And post 4500, double win.

[Odon]

Well that was epic, Nice job Taj.

[Avé]

@ Page 10 now, I can sense the plot twist coming soon.

[SephYuyX]

Well, that was fun, see you all in the next drama thread.

[Taj]

Thread over. (*'-')b

[Samjackson]

I fapped, I cried, I cheered, I fapped while crying and cheering. Over all I give this a 7/10. Mostly because I didn't feel I was also angered.

[Sagacious Sundi]

I'd give it a 7/10 for my own reasons, but compared to more recent topics, it's about a 9.5/10 for me.

[Sonomaa]

how i mien 4 40s?

/itsoverrr

[Rocl]

Nuh-uh!

[Sonomaa]

As everyone is no doubt aware, last month we announced that we would be joining Wikia in an effort to continue our goal of providing the best user experience to our community. As we previously stated, this came about only after many long nights weighing all of our options. We are truely excited about the move. Based on our preview of how the site will look on Wikia, I think everyone will find that this is really going be a nice change with a lot of new features that we would not have been able to deliver without the Wikia technology. While the transition was in large part due to these technology advantages, obviously we will also have the advantage of not needing to figure out how to pay for the hosting charges for the site going forward. The 2007 fundraiser was a huge success. Together we raised $9,372.02 of our $12,000 goal. The community did an incredible job pulling together. We have used $7,050 of the $9,372, thus leaving $2,322 remaining (see below for the 2007 Fundraiser Accounting). So the question becomes, what to do with the "leftovers"?

Now before we get to the fun question of how to spend the leftovers on the community, I do want to sincerely apologize to the community for not addressing this sooner. The administration of this site and the transition to Wikia is no easy task and can fill your plate quickly.

On the administration side, our traffic and bandwidth consumption has grown tremendously since the 2007 fundraiser. We have quadrupled our bandwidth since January, from 600GB to over over 3 Terabytes a month (2400GB on one server and 600-700GB on the second server). The assumptions that we were operating under in January when we began dealing with these issues have magnified significantly - and show no signs of slowing down.

On the transition side, our primary concern has been to make it as smooth as possible and ensure for the community that the FFXIclopedia experience not only doesn't suffer, but improves. The money was not going anywhere, so we did not feel it needed to be immediately addressed. The transition is now in the final stages and we are now able to focus on the remaining funds.

Again, we appologize for not dealing with this sooner - we simply did not have enough hours in the day.

So we have $2,322 left in funds to be used on the FFXIclopedia community. What do we do with that money? We've had some ideas. One was to buy a PC and raffle it off to one lucky winner. I didn't like that idea - I didn't want to see a single person get a prize like that. You can't make all of the people happy all of the time, but you can try. We could give 232,200 users $.01. That didn't seem to make a lot of sense either. We needed something in between. So we came up with the idea of using the remaining funds to purchase and give away Wings of the Goddess expansion packs. Depending on the price of the expansion pack and shipping costs, we could probably give away 25-50 copies - we have a corporate account with Amazon.com, but we won't know exactly how many copies until they do some work on their end and get us pricing for a bulk order.

Personally, I love the idea of giving away Wings of the Goddess expansion packs. I think it's perfect timing. However, we are open to hearing ideas from the community. This is not a refund, so please don't suggest refunding donors some percentage of their donation. This is using the remaining funds for the benefit of the community at large. If you can think of other ideas, we'd love to hear them. We don't have too much time, so please think quickly.

Finally, I love this community - it has truly been good to me. Running this site, from starting it on my linkshell's site to growing it into the most popular FFXI site, has been a unique and rewarding experience. Moving forward, I am anxious to see what working with Wikia will do for the community. The technology advantages will certainly benefit everyone. We were also able to work with them to give away some free beta passes recently, and are talking with them about adding some additional exciting ideas. There will certainly be more to come, so keep an eye on our announcements!

----------------------------------
2007 Fundraiser Accounting
We received over 350 donations ranging from $0.01 to over $200. Any donor donating of more than $25 received a mousepad and any amount over $50 received a mousepad and a tshirt. These items were, and remain, very popular. All questions about the the use of the funds, the donation gifts or anything related to the fundraiser were answered directly. We received more than 130 different emails, plus a number of questions in the forums and on IRC.

T-Shirt/Mousepad costs:
FFXIclopedia T-Shirt = $9
FFXIclopedia mousepad = $5

185 mousepads = $925
110 t-shirts = $990

Sub Total = $1915

Shipping costs:
These varied depending on zip code and country and totalled $485 between shipping materials and shipping costs.

Sub Total = $2400

Server costs:
While our goal was 3 servers, we fell short of the goal and got 2 servers instead. The two servers have a private network between them so calls to the database do not consume public bandwidth. If they did not have a private link, we would use 2-3 times our normal bandwidth and our hosting charges would go through the roof. With our current set up, we are charged $300 per server per month. We have had these servers since March and are still using them right now for a total of 7 months. There was also a $75 setup fee for each server.

$300 * 2 * 7 = $4200
$75 * 2 = 150

Sub Total = $6750

Since the fund raiser started, we have also had to pay $300 in hosting fees to our old host. Our forums still run on the old server, and they have been nice enough to waive our fees from April until now (the old host is also an FFXI player - you know who you are, and your help has been invaluable).

Sub Total = $7050

Grand total: $9372 - $7050 = $2322

Official Ganiman response, discuss.

[Charitwo]

Source:
http://forums.ffxiclopedia.org/viewtopic.php?t=6483

[Sonomaa]

Stay on topic

[Fallso]

Fuck that's a lot of money on t-shirts and mousepads

[JoOeetheplatypuS]

All I have to say is the cost of those t-shirts and mousepads is not what people donated for. They donated to keep one of the best FFXI info sites online.

[Yutuyu]

This is just getting silly now.

You attack them for stealing the money. They say they didn't steal it, but it was/will be used on things. You call them liars for saying that. They show you the documentation. You attack them for mishandling the funds...

It's like back and forth, every time they disprove one of your charges you look for another way to launch a fresh assault at them without realizing all of the slanderous BS you typed 15 minutes ago.

Give it a rest already, not saying they're perfect, but why're people trying so damn hard to insult them each and every time?

[Sendra]

Not much to say. Its really shitty to take thousands of dollars from a lot of people for a good cause and then back out.

[Popsiclestick]

20% of the donations went to mousepads and T-shirts

[Yutuyu]

20% of the donations went to mousepads and T-shirts

More in some individual instances. 50$ donator got 14 dollars worth of items. That's 28%. I can agree easily with everyone else that that's silly... it just seems like they've been attacked enough.