First: No worries, the forum is safe, nothing is in danger.
Second: Like many of the coolest people on the internet, my personal income situation is not great. I’m lucky to have a loving partner with a good stable job but that naturally does not cover all my personal costs.
Third: I just got a lovely Sunday morning email from my hosting provider OVH saying that they’re raising prices across the board, explicitly putting the blame on shortages and cost increases of RAM and storage caused by AI datacenters. My monthly price is going from about €5.50 to €7.85. Additional savings can be made if I renew for more than one month at a time, which I do when I can. Now, I’m not going to lie, from all the research I did to set up this forum, that is still cheap as hell for what I get, and in spite of their dashboard being a little clunky, I’ve been pleased with OVH’s service so far. But I refer you to point two of this post. I don’t run external ads on this site and never will, and if you take into account the time I put into managing the forum both technically and as a community, it is far from a profitable enterprise.
Again, taking into account point number two (you are all the coolest for being here), if you are able and would like to support this thing I’m building, here are ways that you can support the forum and help it persist long into the future:
Patreon
Recurring payments and you get perks! The perks are mostly related to my YouTube activities, but here on the forum you get a cool badge and name color and access to an _exclusive category that, uhh, I haven’t done much with so far, but I might in the future!
Ko-Fi
If you live on your own schedule or would rather do a one time payment, the Ko-Fi is the easiest way to just dump some cash directly into my PayPal account.
Merch
The most physical way to make a contribution and get something in return! Some shirts with trademark Alien Bob slogans on there, and even Underscore stickers. Happy to set up other products if any of you want a mug or something like that.
I also have the technical infrastructure in place to run local ads from users but I don’t think the forum is quite large enough yet to make that sensible, and I’d like to arrange some business administration stuff first before I start directly taking money from forum members in exchange for services.
Anyway, that’s my pitch. Again, the forum is not at risk and as far as I’m concerned it’ll still be here a decade from now. But if you are able and willing to help me keep it running, it will be much appreciated. And if you can’t, that’s okay. I love having you here.