PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

Several months ago, really almost a year now, Play By Web received the donation of a late model barely used PC from a loyal user. Because of time issues, and because of a general fear of fixing what ain’t broke this machine has been sitting by serving only as an emergency backup in case something happened to the live server. I’ve decided to get off my duff and put the thing into operation. It’s a decent upgrade from the current server hardware and it seems a shame just leaving it sit there unused.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be getting it up and going and transferring existing data to the new box. I’m also going to be upgrading the operating system and whatnot. This won’t be completely painless I’m sure, but most of the work for me will be in getting the new server setup and I won’t take the existing server down till I am confident I’ve got the new one working right. There will be some downtime towards the end of the process, but I am going to make every effort to keep it to a minimum.

The new box doesn’t have enough memory and it’s incompatible with the current server’s memory sticks. Also it came with a pair of 40GB HDD’s, which are certainly useable, but hardware is pretty cheap right now so I’m planning on getting a single larger HDD instead. I’m looking at going for 2GB of memory and there’s a nice 250GB HDD on sale pretty cheap that I think will more than accommodate the larger files involved with SE5.

Altogether I’m looking at about $240 for the memory and HDD. If anyone feels the urge to donate to PBW to offset some of this cost it would certainly be appreciated. Donations are accepted via Paypal and there are links to donate in my signature and also on the PBW website.

Stay tuned for further updates. Hopefully when this is all done the site will be humming along better than ever.

Geoschmo

Re: PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

Has Malfador helped you guys out? This seems like a service they should offer, or at the least support.

Re: PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

I think it would really be more up to Strategy First than Malfador...

Re: PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

Malfador and Shrapnel both supported us over the years with free swag which we used as fundraiser prizes.

Speaking of that, I still have some SEIV mouspads laying around. If someone wants to make a donation and would like a mousepad I'd be happy to send you one. They might be collectors items now. I don't know if they are available anywhere else. Maybe I should put them up on Ebay. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

hirmn, is there any other way than PayPal?

oh, and it's down... is this related?

Re: PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

No, the downtime was not related. The Cable modem locked up last night and required a hard boot to get it going this morning. One of the few times the script hasn't been able to reset it. Should be ok now.

Re: PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

made you a small donation for all the work you do.

Re: PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

Geo, have you guys ever thought of selling PBW gear? like hats, t-shirts, and such?

Re: PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

Actually, I have thought about it. I actually have been checking into it a little today. I might have something more on that topic in the next few days. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Geoschmo

Re: PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

You probably don't want to be getting merchandise from down here in Tasmania, but for the record I work for a company that does stuff like logos on caps and shirts etc.

Re: PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

Maybe there could be licensed franchises to produce stuff locally for the international players?

Re: PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

I trust not paypal.

Re: PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

aye narf.
doesn't google do something simular now?
has anyone used here it? I heard it had a few teething troubles, but what's it like now?

Re: PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

I don't trust 'em either.
So I pay it by credit card and make sure it gets to the other end before paying the credit card... just to be safe.

Re: PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

I understand people have concerns with Paypal. Fortunatly as far as I know I've never had any problem with them. Either with donations to PBW or my own personal use buying stuff online. I think the main problems people have had with them in the past is when thet have gotten ripped off by a sellor, Paypal was less helpful than they could have been in resolving the dispute. That shouldn't be a problem for anybody with PBW donations I hope.

As far as alternatives, when we started taking donations on PBW there were some similar services out there, but I think Paypal is really the only one left of any consequence. Google's version seems to have gone away, or perhaps they haven't got it off the ground yet. I can't find a link to it anyway.

For a while I had a PO box and I took donations by mail. We never got enough to offset the cost of the box rental. If anyone really, really wants to send a donation and can't get past their aversion to Paypal, I can give you my address in an email. I understand in this day and age it's not really hard to find someone's personal information so if someone really wanted to they could find my name and address online. But I don't care to post it and make it easier on the spam bots. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

Some people who haven't had any problems themselves object to Paypal's business practices.

Re: PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

Well, that's pretty vague. I don't want to set myself up as some sort of Paypal defender, but pick a business and you can find people that will object to it's business practices. In fact you can find a significant portion of the population that objects to business in general. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

All I can say is Paypal offers a service. A pretty valuable and conveinent service for an operation like PBW. If we didn't have Paypal we'd be dependant on mail donations which would entail all sorts of headaches and hassles with cashing checks, making deposits, worrying about envelopes lost in the mail, etc. And we wouldn't even be able to consider taking credit card donations because of the costs and hassles to get that sort of thing setup. And on top of that the CC compaines take a percentage just like Paypal.

It would be different if this were a real money making operation, but it's not and isn't intended to be. Not that I object to making money. I just don't see PBW as having real pontential for positive cash flow. The user base is loyal, but too small. We'd have to branch out into other games to really make a go of that and I just don't have the skills for the programming needed for something like that. At least not yet. Who knows what the future may hold.

Is Paypal perfect? No way. But considering they handle BILLIONS of dollars in transactions every month they must be doing a pretty decent job or they'd be out of business or facing droves of competitors by now.

Re: PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

I used to sell online at ebay with paypal, and I took donations during my se.org days with paypal.
I can safely safe they suck. google was supposed to have a service called "GPay", i believe, a few years back that would compete with paypal, unfortunately ebay was unwilling to partner with google on it and offer this payment solution alongside paypal and that killed the project much like how ebay shut out other paypal-like services from ebay.

Geo is right on the other concerns with payment by mail and credit card processing companies are among the worst to deal with. Paypal, sadly, is the least of several evils.

As for other games, I always told aaron that a dungeon odyssey MMO would be a lot of fun and attract players who can't play games like WOW or Everquest or just want to have a casual hack'n'slash without having to worry about a Leeroy Jenkins.

Re: PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...
 

And I don't want to derail the thread into a discussion of Paypal's shortcomings. Anybody who's interested can find plenty of Web sites by Paypal's critics.

I've used Paypal in the past, and probably would again if I really needed to, but everything I'd use it for right now are luxuries that I can do without.