Xyon
Puts the Fun in Dysfunctional
- Joined
- Aug 9, 2009
- Messages
- 6,904
- Reaction score
- 750
- Points
- 203
- Location
- 10.0.0.1
- Website
- www.orbiter-radio.co.uk
- Preferred Pronouns
- she/her
My fellow Orbinauts;
I know things have been quieter around these parts than they used to be, and I want to make it clear that this in no way means our board is being neglected. All the active forum staff are dedicated to keeping the public boards clear of spam, and that takes a lot of effort behind the scenes that you might not see from the public perspective; that means it's working! I've also been putting a lot of work in the last 18 months to get the technologies our servers use and the software we rely on to the latest and most secure versions I can.
To that end, you may have seen my call for vBulletin-5 compliant style assistance a little earlier this year. As long time customers of vBulletin, it initially seemed to make a good deal of sense for us to move from our current, ageing 3.8 version of the software to the newest offering from the same developers, because the upgrade path to that newer version seemed like it would be most straightforward, as compared to migrating to an alternative product. This, however, has not been the case; the call for styling went mostly unanswered, and I hit several other niggling issues with migrating the data onto our test board that I couldn't see a simple path to resolve. On top of this, vBulletin 5 hasn't been the huge stride ahead in modernity that we'd expected, and there are a number of deficiencies in the offering the developers don't seem to want to solve directly, relying instead on the goodwill (and voluntary time) of third-party extension developers.
So, over the last week, I've been looking at alternatives, and I've hit on a couple of likely candidates, the frontrunner at the moment being xenforo. This looks, from front and back-end, like it ticks most of the boxes we want, while having built-in capacity to import data from our version of vBulletin (among others). As well, the developers have given me some assurances that if it proves not to be a solution for our board after a few weeks of usage, we would be able to get a full refund of our license cost, which we'd then potentially put towards a different product.
You can request a free demo of XenForo on their site, and have a click around, both front and backend - it's pretty slick and straightfoward, but crucially, it's a supported piece of software, which is more than can be said for even the current version of vBulletin. The licensing costs, however, are where we've hit a bit of an issue, and before I go into how we got here, I'll just show you a screenshot from this morning when I went to the Orbiter Forum PayPal account to check our balance - something I generally only do once or twice a year;
All the way back in 2015, I made a post about some issues we were facing with PayPal suspending our account because we had too much money in it, and we'd exceeded a (seemingly arbitrary) threshold wherin they wanted us to prove our identies. Because of the nationality of one of our founding members (that'd be Tim, if you're curious), Orbiter Forum is established as an Australian "company", though not one that turns a profit. At the time, we had a balance just north of 1,000 AUD, which was something like 740 USD on the exchange markets at the time.
PayPal didn't like the evidence we submitted the first few times and eventually suspended our ability to take payments. We couldn't access our funds, and, importantly, all regular donations to the PayPal account were disrupted. PayPal still don't let you pause and resume a recurring payment; either you're paying someone, or you aren't. So when we eventually settled the matter with them, through some serious hard work and repeated phone calls Tim had to make, we had access to our existing balance again, but the recurring donations were gone.
A lot of very observant and generous members realised this and came back to re-establish their recurring donations. Some didn't realise, or just didn't decide to re-start their donation. We take donations extremely gratefully, and I'm really grateful each and every time anybody chooses to donate to our coffers to help cover our server bills. However, it became clear after a month or so that our regular income had diminished after this incident, greatly, and we had to re-balance a few things at the time to keep things as they should be, and we soldiered on.
In 2018, it happened again. Now, I perhaps could've seen it coming the first time, what with the balance slowly increasing and such, but the second time came as a real surprise to us all. We had, or so we thought, resolved the identity issues with PayPal, and once again I had to drag Tim out of his busy life and ask him to get on a phone and argue the toss with PayPal again. This dragged on for a bit, but had the same impact on our PayPal account; once more, all the regular subscriptions were discontinued. We had 1000 AUD in the account at this time, around the start of 2018.
Since then, we have been receiving about 25 USD monthly from our remaining regular donators. I am, and I will remain, extremely grateful to anybody who chooses to part with their hard-earned cash by donating some of it to the forum, but the reality is this;
So this is in part an appeal to those of you who might have had recurring donations in the past, or might not have realised the situation that we're in, but if you can spare a small amount monthly, we'll be able to keep the lights flashing in the server room for a good while to come. I want to be clear, though, we have also a buffer in our hosting provider - about 100 USD - so there's no immediate danger of Orbiter Forum suddenly going offline when the PayPal account runs dry; having been burned twice by PayPal this seemed like a prudent course to take.
Before we can really think about updating to newer software, we need to get the server bills being paid. If we can get the forum's coffers back up to the levels of last January, I can take some of that capital and invest it in a XenForo licence, and this unlocks a few previously locked avenues for further community development, some of which I'll list here;
Thanks for reading.
I know things have been quieter around these parts than they used to be, and I want to make it clear that this in no way means our board is being neglected. All the active forum staff are dedicated to keeping the public boards clear of spam, and that takes a lot of effort behind the scenes that you might not see from the public perspective; that means it's working! I've also been putting a lot of work in the last 18 months to get the technologies our servers use and the software we rely on to the latest and most secure versions I can.
To that end, you may have seen my call for vBulletin-5 compliant style assistance a little earlier this year. As long time customers of vBulletin, it initially seemed to make a good deal of sense for us to move from our current, ageing 3.8 version of the software to the newest offering from the same developers, because the upgrade path to that newer version seemed like it would be most straightforward, as compared to migrating to an alternative product. This, however, has not been the case; the call for styling went mostly unanswered, and I hit several other niggling issues with migrating the data onto our test board that I couldn't see a simple path to resolve. On top of this, vBulletin 5 hasn't been the huge stride ahead in modernity that we'd expected, and there are a number of deficiencies in the offering the developers don't seem to want to solve directly, relying instead on the goodwill (and voluntary time) of third-party extension developers.
So, over the last week, I've been looking at alternatives, and I've hit on a couple of likely candidates, the frontrunner at the moment being xenforo. This looks, from front and back-end, like it ticks most of the boxes we want, while having built-in capacity to import data from our version of vBulletin (among others). As well, the developers have given me some assurances that if it proves not to be a solution for our board after a few weeks of usage, we would be able to get a full refund of our license cost, which we'd then potentially put towards a different product.
You can request a free demo of XenForo on their site, and have a click around, both front and backend - it's pretty slick and straightfoward, but crucially, it's a supported piece of software, which is more than can be said for even the current version of vBulletin. The licensing costs, however, are where we've hit a bit of an issue, and before I go into how we got here, I'll just show you a screenshot from this morning when I went to the Orbiter Forum PayPal account to check our balance - something I generally only do once or twice a year;
All the way back in 2015, I made a post about some issues we were facing with PayPal suspending our account because we had too much money in it, and we'd exceeded a (seemingly arbitrary) threshold wherin they wanted us to prove our identies. Because of the nationality of one of our founding members (that'd be Tim, if you're curious), Orbiter Forum is established as an Australian "company", though not one that turns a profit. At the time, we had a balance just north of 1,000 AUD, which was something like 740 USD on the exchange markets at the time.
PayPal didn't like the evidence we submitted the first few times and eventually suspended our ability to take payments. We couldn't access our funds, and, importantly, all regular donations to the PayPal account were disrupted. PayPal still don't let you pause and resume a recurring payment; either you're paying someone, or you aren't. So when we eventually settled the matter with them, through some serious hard work and repeated phone calls Tim had to make, we had access to our existing balance again, but the recurring donations were gone.
A lot of very observant and generous members realised this and came back to re-establish their recurring donations. Some didn't realise, or just didn't decide to re-start their donation. We take donations extremely gratefully, and I'm really grateful each and every time anybody chooses to donate to our coffers to help cover our server bills. However, it became clear after a month or so that our regular income had diminished after this incident, greatly, and we had to re-balance a few things at the time to keep things as they should be, and we soldiered on.
In 2018, it happened again. Now, I perhaps could've seen it coming the first time, what with the balance slowly increasing and such, but the second time came as a real surprise to us all. We had, or so we thought, resolved the identity issues with PayPal, and once again I had to drag Tim out of his busy life and ask him to get on a phone and argue the toss with PayPal again. This dragged on for a bit, but had the same impact on our PayPal account; once more, all the regular subscriptions were discontinued. We had 1000 AUD in the account at this time, around the start of 2018.
Since then, we have been receiving about 25 USD monthly from our remaining regular donators. I am, and I will remain, extremely grateful to anybody who chooses to part with their hard-earned cash by donating some of it to the forum, but the reality is this;
- We take 25 USD in from donations on a monthly regular basis
- We haven't really taken any one-time donations recently
- Our monthly expenses for operating the site is 60 USD
So this is in part an appeal to those of you who might have had recurring donations in the past, or might not have realised the situation that we're in, but if you can spare a small amount monthly, we'll be able to keep the lights flashing in the server room for a good while to come. I want to be clear, though, we have also a buffer in our hosting provider - about 100 USD - so there's no immediate danger of Orbiter Forum suddenly going offline when the PayPal account runs dry; having been burned twice by PayPal this seemed like a prudent course to take.
Before we can really think about updating to newer software, we need to get the server bills being paid. If we can get the forum's coffers back up to the levels of last January, I can take some of that capital and invest it in a XenForo licence, and this unlocks a few previously locked avenues for further community development, some of which I'll list here;
- Single-sign on to a new OHM website using your OF handle - a real, oauth2 SSO, not some janky shared database or cookie hack
- Proper OHM integration - again, none of this shared database nonsense. I need an API endpoint on the forum side that just doesn't exist in vBulletin.
- Further SSO to services like the Orbiter Forum Discord Server
- More, yet to be developed and announced, features involving Orbiter itself.
Thanks for reading.
