More Bandwidth and Revenue Needed

SQ · Post by SQ » Mon Sep 26, 2005 6:11 pm

How did you get that? By clicking on the "pledge" button?
Can't find it.. X|

-dies-

Scintilla · Post by **Scintilla** » Mon Sep 26, 2005 6:16 pm

No, all that is directly above the "<b>WE ARE COUNTING ON YOU!!</B>" and the three buttons, two of which say "pledge" and the third of which says "proceed". The screen comes up randomly every so often in the Super Search process (from hitting the "search" button, I mean).

It also does this when I try to download a locally hosted video, and I often have to scroll down to get to the "proceed" button, so it's hard to miss.

SQ · Post by SQ » Mon Sep 26, 2005 6:21 pm

Ah, see, that doesn't come up for me because I just donated again. All that stuff disappears when you donate.

So I guess my suggestion still stands.

Thanks for listing the stuff, though. ^_^

Also, it says "Member profile" right under donation status at the end of the list. Did they mean "donation status ON member profile" or do we have a whole new member profile thing I don't know about?

Scintilla · Post by **Scintilla** » Mon Sep 26, 2005 6:25 pm

SQ wrote:Also, it says "Member profile" right under donation status at the end of the list. Did they mean "donation status ON member profile" or do we have a whole new member profile thing I don't know about?

Yeah, that's what they meant. It was an outline two or three levels deep, and I didn't properly format it, just copied and pasted the text directly.

So "Filter By", "Sort By", and "Donation Status Display Option" should all be menus, so to speak.

Rurounikeitaro · Post by **Rurounikeitaro** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 12:27 am

Yo, I'll donate some money. I tried to long before but my status turned into default cause I used a credit card.

I like my default status though. It's funny when people say "ooohhh, howdya get default" and I say "the hell?! You think default means something good ya idiot!?" Then we get into an arguement. I'll send at least $5.00 bucks or more by the end of this week through mail by money order.

7sigma · Post by **7sigma** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 1:18 pm

Since one of the core problems seems to be why people aren't donating, I guess I can throw out my 2 cents.

I use the org almost dayly for downloads and have a couple of my own vids on the local server. Me and many of my friends would love to donate. However, we are brazilian: 1 US$ costs us around 3 bucks. It would be costly, but not impossible, to donate perhaps 10$ each. However, the minimum pledge takes US$ 30 in three months, if I read it right. That's beyond what anyone without a stable job can guarantee around here, and there is punishment for not fullfilling a pledge.

So, if there was a lower limit for donations, I would donate, and I think many of us not in the U.S. or Europe would find it easier, too.

P.S: I know we can send money by mail, but the sheer price of the stamp would surpass the donation in many cases.

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 1:28 pm

7sigma wrote:I use the org almost dayly for downloads and have a couple of my own vids on the local server. Me and many of my friends would love to donate. However, we are brazilian: 1 US$ costs us around 3 bucks. It would be costly, but not impossible, to donate perhaps 10$ each. However, the minimum pledge takes US$ 30 in three months, if I read it right. That's beyond what anyone without a stable job can guarantee around here, and there is punishment for not fullfilling a pledge.

No, there is absolutely no minimum pledge.
This is the way it works:
You pledge how often you will be able to donate, and how much you will donate each time. For example, you can say $5 every month. You are also allowed to do a 1 time donation (its called yearly) and you only specify the amount you want to send, and thats all you are obligated to send. So you can say you want to do a $10 yearly donation, and thats all you ever have to give.
The donation page is really long and confusing, so they really should completely re-make it, I think.

ChibiDrunkSanzo · Post by **ChibiDrunkSanzo** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 2:15 pm

There are a lot of pages here to go through, so forgive me if this has been suggested before. But why not sell advertising space to outside companies? This site gets a lot of traffic, and you can set your own terms about no pop-ups and the like. It would take a bit to get going, yes, but it could be a viable source of revenue in a little time. Especially if you e-mail specific companies that deal with anime asking if they'd like to advertise with you, such as RightStuf and Anime Nation.

Just a thought.

Lu Tze · Post by **Lu Tze** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 2:49 pm

I suppose this has been proposed a couple of times, but what about just adding a few non-popup banners (since popups get blocked by most browsers) ?
Personally, I find those pledge-drive-popups rather annoying, and I think I am not the only one. A few non-animated banners would be a better solution, because that way you would get a little bit of money from anyone AND the site would be more pleasent to navigate through.
Of course, donators should be able to browse without banners.

As for a general speed cap: That is not a good idea. It will only make downloads last longer, which does not help anyone. And making a per-day cap will not work either, since as someone has already noted, it would lead to multiple accounts. Of course, you could check IPs or something, but I think that would also generate more problems than it would solve.

However, perhaps you could add some kind of cap to the popular titles, if these are causing the majority of traffic. For example, you could introduce a 1000 (or 100 or whatever) downloads per day limit on a specific title. To compensate that, you could create a filesharing server, preferably an eD2K/Kad one, and add the neceassary links to the AMV-download selection page, in this case ed2k-links. Of course, that would be a bit of work, and I suppose a "How to use eMule" guide would be necessary, but you should definetely consider it, as eMule is really useful for downloading many AMVs. In fact, about 50% of the videos I downloaded, I downloaded with eMule.

In the long run it might also help a little to encourage people to create smaller files. In my opinion, there are way too many oversized files in the database. For example I compressed Euphoria to about 2/5 the size using the somewhat outdated XVid, and it looks almost same. Reducing the size limit to 70 MB or 50 MB and encouraging people to use newer codecs, like X264, would also help in the long run. It looks like some people spent dozens of hours creating their codec, and are then too lazy, to even use a two-pass encoding for their AMV.

Well, these are my ideas on this subject. There really are many solutions to your problem.

Lu Tze · Post by **Lu Tze** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 2:54 pm

It is supposed to say "creating their AMV", of course.
People creating their own video codecs for their AMVs would be rather interesting...