Now that the dust has died down, here is an update on what you goats have done since the Angel announcement. If you haven't read this please do, it's a serious matter.
You have sent in 6.21405968 BTC in total which is approximately ~$12,428.00 USD (using $2K/BTC as price fluctuates). Please note the BTC donations were in a large part made by a single transaction.
Store Transactions:
| Date |
Amount |
| 18-May-2017 |
4,279.00 (USD) |
| 19-May-2017 |
5,200.00 (USD) |
| 20-May-2017 |
2,595.00 (USD) |
| 21-May-2017 |
1,800.00 (USD) |
| 22-May-2017 |
1,100.00 (USD) |
| Total* |
14,924.00 (USD) |
Total Donations:
| Date |
Amount |
| Store |
14,924.00 (USD) |
| BTC |
12,428.00 (USD) |
| Total |
27,352.00 (USD) |
Voat, I'm so very proud of you for pulling together and giving Voat another chance. I personally know that every donation is a sacrifice being made and I won't loose sight of this.
A note on hosting costs:
The value of $6,600.90 (USD) mentioned in the above announcement was for the billing period of 2017-04-01 through 2017-04-30. This means we have another bill coming up in one week. I did not turn down the hardware specs because of the uncertainty of the rather odd T_D advance and retreat we saw. Also, these amounts do not include all bills such as cloudflare and a few other small things were not added in.
This amount only gives us at most 3-4 months of operational only funds at our current burn rate, which isn't much. So now the real work begins.
Next Steps
In the short-run, we have to reduce operating costs significantly (porting to open backends and runtimes) and we need to get organized as a community. I simply cannot manage Voat alone and now is the time I admit this and open Voat up to help from the community. I will need volunteers to help with Voat's operations such sales, marketing, and community relations. If you have a strength and you want to help Voat, please send an email to [email protected] with your proposal. Voat also needs a lawyer for a few small things (our first pro-bono lawyer disappeared on us with no explanation) so if any are out there we'd love to hear from you.
I'm significantly delayed with responding to emails but I am working through them. Also, I am unable to stay on top of PM's through Voat (I have thousands of unread PMs). So please reach out via email if something is important.
I will shortly be making a post to v/voatdev with plans for migrating Voat to an open runtime.
Canary
https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806
view the rest of the comments →
Le_Squish ago
Putt, have you considered daily downtown to cut cost in a more immediate way? 2 or 3 hours everyday during slow posting times?
Edit: Some goats are suggesting going down on Sundays...what you think? Off day for you at least based admin.
Crensch ago
I'd even be OK with cycling on and off every half hour. As those faggot T_D said, our front page is slow. News is slow. We can get our fix for a half our, and come back a half hour later to do it again.
It'd be novel idea, but would double the time we can stay afloat if it's viable.
GasRite ago
EE with practically no hosting knowledge here:
Can you run a website with something similar to time-delay multiplexing? Like, have it be "offline" and display a static cached copy for 29.9 minutes while keeping a log of all comments/submissions/votes that are sent in during that time and then at t=30min, "go live" for a second to update all the comments and vote tallies?
That way the site doesn't incur the cost of remaining live all the time, but its still always browse-able. Just with a little bit of a lag time between actions. You could even stagger the update times or scale them based on traffic or other factors.
Is that something that would work?
kyle ago
The server would still have to be running all the time, the only difference would be that it's serving up static pages instead of dynamic ones. It would reduce the number of database queries, sure, but I don't think that would make a huge difference. Plus, the end-user experience would be hit hard, and it would require a massive overhaul of the site's code.
superdisk ago
What really needs to be fixed is the database queries, the site fetches the comments in an N+1 query and hits the database hundreds of times on each request.
kyle ago
Is this true? How would you know that this is the issue? (serious question, not being snarky)
superdisk ago
You can go look at the ugly LINQ queries on github, this site is open source.
Slayfire122 ago
I don't know if something like that is possible our plausible because I don't know jack shit about coding. However, if we did do something like that, half an hour is to much. I would suggest something like refreshing the posts every 10 minutes and the comments every 2. During the night when everything is slow, you can change it to 30 minutes for posts and 5 minutes for comments.
9234275? ago
I don't know much about these things but my guess is never be a surge when the site comes back up which would offset the crash in traffic.
Crensch ago
You might be right. I'm not sure how it'd work out either, but I'm happy to sacrifice X time of the day to stretch the donations out. I think having the same huge block at one part of the day might be a bad thing, but I could be wrong there, too.
Ch3ck3rs ago
Maybe making it read only for half an hour, live for half an hour like @slayfire122 suggested.
This could make upvoating interesting, but it's worth the price if we can stay up longer
Crensch ago
I'd be OK with a single GoatNap landing page for the half hour, but if read-only is really low resource consumption than that'd be even more awesome. Maybe have a single red line down the left side of the screen when in read-only, and have it turn green when it's live?