[DRAFT] Tamriel Rebuilt Website Donations

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Why's picture
Why
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Welcome to the second dozennial Tamriel Rebuilt website hosting fundraising drive!

Tamriel Rebuilt the project is a long-term, ambitious volunteer effort to create mainland Morrowind. To date, about 40% of the mainland's landmass has been released to the public, and our next two expansions, set to be released simultaneously, are poised to push that percentage closer to 50%, and to bring the number of quests in our released files close to that of the original game. This content is, and always will be, available for free to everyone to play and download. Indeed, TR has a strict policy against paid modding, and we do not accept unsollicited donations. Due to the volunteer nature of our project, TR is essentially a shared hobby of its members and modders, and accepting donations would do little to nothing to speed up development. But that does not mean that keeping our project alive and in the air is without cost. Our website and infrastructure hosting costs are rising, and to alleviate this, we will be accepting donations, for a limited time, through this article. These donations go directly to our webmaster, who pays our AWS bills. Read on to find out more about our reasoning behind this fundraising drive.

Donate directly to Magamo
(Malcolm Mallardi):


Alternatively, use this QR code:

The gracious support of our long-time webmaster Magamo has allowed TR to build out and upgrade this website, which serves as both our community hub as well as the platform we use to develop our mod using our claim and asset browser systems. With Magamo's help we have finally restored much of our old forum's functionality, meaning that much of Tamriel Rebuilt's long history is now once again available in a searchable interface. Our website itself has come a long way since its earliest incarnation, and our beloved sister Project Tamriel and our shared Wiki have also moved over to Magamo's infrastructure. Magamo has not only volunteered many hours of work to our project, but also paid for much of our hosting costs out of pocket, occasionally supplemented by private donations from our core membership team. But these recent developments of our websites and infrastructure as well as increased strain on our servers by webscraping bots and generally increased traffic have raised our monthly hosting cost to a point where we find it unconscionable to rely solely on Magamo's undying love and support to keep our website afloat. Nor do we want to reduce the functionality of our website, which is the central pillar that our project is built around, and we want to keep our website free of advertisements, excessive trackers and other shady money-making nonsense.


Our Amazon Web Services monthly hosting fees, 2018-onwards

This means that, for the second time in its existence and the first time since 2010, Tamriel Rebuilt will be opening a channel for donations to support our website hosting. Our short term goal is to raise $1000 to offset the recent and unprecedented spike in hosting fees as well as to pay future hosting bills for the coming year. When this fundraising goal is met or exceeded, we will provide you with an update on this website detailing the amount raised. Despite the flippant hook about dozennial fundraisers, we may see the need to continue doing these in subsequent years, depending on the funds raised this time around. As we said before, this money is solely for hosting our website and content. It will not be used to support mod development or pay modders or artists for their contributions to TR - we have a strict policy against paid modding. Still, if you appreciate our content and want to help us out beyond contributing to the mod itself, consider this your opportunity to help keep both Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel on the internet.

Thank you for your support!

Why's picture
Why
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Everyone with edit powers feel free to make changes to the above directly, or suggest changes here.

Sultan of Rum's picture
Sultan of Rum
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Reads really good, I will go through it in detail later.

Does this mean we should hold off of the progress post or should I, rather, get the progress post out pretty soon? I presume we want the donation drive to be on the top of the website for as much time as it takes.

Sorry I haven't been on Discord lately to stay on top of things; I'm trying out a Discord break for now.

Why's picture
Why
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Last seen:
2 months 2 days ago

I think the general idea is that we'll push this one out ASAP, and then plug it in the upcoming progress report, too, for maximum exposure. Your news posts and updates tend to be well-received whereas I am not sure how much attention a simple "give us money please" is going to generate.