Donation Guidelines

[Lorica]

Is there a number that someone like DarkUnderlord could provide that estimates roughly what each donating member of the Codex would need to donate annually in order to cover the Codex's operating expenses for a year? Including and excluding ad revenue and whatever referral money the Codex gets in an average year (understanding that these things may be changing a bit with recent occurences)? These tiered reward things with GD and whatnot are all well and good, but I'm interested in knowing exactly what a "fair share" might look like, comrades.

 

[DwarvenFood]

Also paging Taluntain but I do recall recently that keeping the site up costs around $500 / month ? Don't know about the income and publisher kickbacks though.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

That should be Taluntain

Is there a number that someone like DarkUnderlord could provide that estimates roughly what each donating member of the Codex would need to donate annually in order to cover the Codex's operating expenses for a year?

I'm not sure what you'd classify as a "donating member"? If you mean people who have already donated, then it depends on how you cut it. If we take those who just donated to our recent campaign, then they'd each need to donate $51 on average every year in order to fund the Codex purely from donations.

Including and excluding ad revenue and whatever referral money the Codex gets in an average year (understanding that these things may be changing a bit with recent occurences)? These tiered reward things with GD and whatnot are all well and good, but I'm interested in knowing exactly what a "fair share" might look like, comrades.

Ads pay for a fair whack of it. At the moment (although it will sometimes vary) we can meet about 60% of costs from advertising. Taking that into consideration, it drops to about $20 on average per annum (spread over 117 people). That seems "do-able" (although we've only ever regularly raised cash in decent amounts when we've asked for it). Now we have just run a campaign - so we should be fine for a while but I'd rather have "money in the kitty" that gives us flexibility then having to go "oh-shit, we need $$$" one month. Especially as we've continued to grow (we've gone from an average of 400 active users visiting every day back in May 2012 - to over 1,000 today).

We've effectively more than doubled our "active users" in a year (that's forum accounts visiting every day, not unique visitors - I use it because unique's change depending on the method you use but they also follow the same trend). We crossed the 1,000 threshold this month. If growth continues at that rate (which it pretty much has, doubling fairly consistently every year for the last few years now), we'll need to move the server at some point into a cloud.

 

[Lorica]

 

[asfasdf]

How can I donate anonymously? I am not interested in linking my personal data in the paypal account.

 

[felipepepe]

I always find amusing how many lurkers we have... the "regular" Codex seems to be no more than 100 posters, even the most popular polls never get that high, and the most fistes post is at 70 brofists, still we have over 1k people lurking every month... is like we're a massive sitcom that people come to watch.

 

[Jaesun]

 

[felipepepe]

Seriously, think about that for a moment.... some people here even have catchfrases!

Infinitron gets in the room and copy pasta a newspost. People starts brofisting him.
felipepepe curses infinitron's brofist farming.
evdk comes in and say no one care anyway about the goddam brofists.
Awor blackly states that everything is shit and leave.
:canned laughter:

 

[Jaesun]

Dude you totally need to make a video of the Kodex Komedy Khour.

 

[Whisky]

I was one of those lurking sit-com watchers for a long time. So I can attest, we do exist.

 

[kazgar]

Seriously, think about that for a moment.... some people here even have catchfrases!

Infinitron gets in the room and copy pasta a newspost. People starts brofisting him.
felipepepe curses infinitron's brofist farming.
evdk comes in and say no one care anyway about the goddam brofists.
Awor blackly states that everything is shit and leave.
:canned laughter:

 

[felipepepe]

Dude you totally need to make a video of the Kodex Komedy Khour.

That's really not a bad ideia.


Still, best catchfrase will still be DU's "k'"

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Sheek: Welcome Volourn. That's a very intelligent first thread you wrote there, I am sure you'll make a great addition to our community here.

*laughter*

catchfrase

huehuehue

 

[evdk]

huehuehue

That's the laugh track.

 

[Broseph]

I was one of those lurking sit-com watchers for a long time. So I can attest, we do exist.

Yes, Codex never fails to consistently entertain. I was lurking here for nearly a year before I signed up, so I was already familiar with a lot of Codex memes.

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

I remember first thread on the codex, about the Kotor and magical influences of number 7. It was the best pilot of a new forum ever. Also the photoshop guys brought tears of laugh many times. And lurking is the part of the codex, comparing the other sites/forums you must adapt to environment. Considering earlier GD openess, very hazardous .

 

[Taluntain]

How can I donate anonymously? I am not interested in linking my personal data in the paypal account.

There's no really anonymous option, the sender of the money is always visible, not that anyone here actually cares who you are.

 

[asfasdf]

Tough luck then, because I will not link this information, no matter how much you care. I will see if I can find an anonymous alternative in paypal.

 

[Brother None]

There's no really anonymous option, the sender of the money is always visible, not that anyone here actually cares who you are.

Sharing that info among admins seems pretty dubious tho. I mean, I don't care, my PayPal address is out of date anyway even if you guys see it, and my real name is public knowledge already, but if you want to actively discourage people to donate, then treating their personal information that carelessly is exactly the way to do it. Just food for thought.

Especially as we've continued to grow (we've gone from an average of 400 active users visiting every day back in May 2012 - to over 1,000 today).

That graph appears to be saying you went from about 800 to 1000 active users, and from about 400 post brofists to 1500. Maybe I'm confused tho'.

Codex' lack of profitability has always been a source of some wonderment to me, but I guess it's what happens when most traffic goes to a forum (and most users are exactly the type of people to use AdBlock, even more so than with most gaming websites).

 

[Country_Gravy]

i think active users was at around 750 in may with 400 being the amount of fisting going on. As you can see, the Codex has gotten much more comfortable with fisting. I blame trannies.

 

[Aurelius]

How can I donate anonymously? I am not interested in linking my personal data in the paypal account.

Same for me. I would have donated to the Torment fundraiser, but even if I wanted to use my real name and address, I can't because I'm using gift cards, which are not linked to my name. Well, at least kickstarter/Amazon payments isn't afraid of my anonymous money.

 

[Taluntain]

Tough luck then, because I will not link this information, no matter how much you care. I will see if I can find an anonymous alternative in paypal.

What exactly do you mean by "link this information"? What we see is what we get back from PayPal in terms of donation notifications and nothing else. That's just how PayPal works - it identifies both the sender and receiver of the money for obvious reasons, i.e. fraud prevention. This isn't any different here than with any other website or service using PayPal.

There's no really anonymous option, the sender of the money is always visible, not that anyone here actually cares who you are.

Sharing that info among admins seems pretty dubious tho. I mean, I don't care, my PayPal address is out of date anyway even if you guys see it, and my real name is public knowledge already, but if you want to actively discourage people to donate, then treating their personal information that carelessly is exactly the way to do it. Just food for thought.

Where'd you get the idea that anyone is sharing it among the admins? Most of the time, it's either just DU or me that even get to see this information in terms of PayPal notifications. And what we get to see is the name, surname and PayPal e-mail. Not exactly very identifiable. To my knowledge, none of it has ever been shared outside the two of us. So, yea, "carelessly"? Huh?

Especially as we've continued to grow (we've gone from an average of 400 active users visiting every day back in May 2012 - to over 1,000 today).

That graph appears to be saying you went from about 800 to 1000 active users, and from about 400 post brofists to 1500. Maybe I'm confused tho'.

Codex' lack of profitability has always been a source of some wonderment to me, but I guess it's what happens when most traffic goes to a forum (and most users are exactly the type of people to use AdBlock, even more so than with most gaming websites).

That's mostly correct, DU must have read the stats wrong.

All of Codex is classified as a forum since that gets it some leeway in terms of extremely low click-throughs, but even so it's been bumped off several advertising providers for having below what what they accept as minimum allowed click-throughs considering the amount of ads served. Coupled with AdBlocking being the norm among non-Patrons, there's really not much to wonder about. The people who do see ads never click them and most of the rest usually block all of them.

Independent gaming sites as a rule get the crappiest ad rates possible due to very low amounts of clicks (not to mention mostly low-quality available advertising), but Codex is in a league all of its own, even compared to my site and the other hosted ones.

 

[Lorica]

All of Codex is classified as a forum since that gets it some leeway in terms of extremely low click-throughs, but even so it's been bumped off several advertising providers for having below what what they accept as minimum allowed click-throughs. Coupled with AdBlocking being the norm among non-Patrons, there's really not much to wonder about. The people who do see ads never click them and most of the rest usually block all of them.

Independent gaming sites as a rule get the crappiest ad rates possible due to very low amounts of clicks (not to mention mostly low-quality available advertising), but Codex is in a league all of its own, even compared to my site and the other hosted ones.

So I figured. Maybe I missed it somewhere, but I think it probably can't hurt to have a little transparency about operating costs and such, so thanks again for the estimates.

 

[Taluntain]

There've been a few threads about it mostly in this forum IIRC over the years... whenever someone asked, really.

 

[Brother None]

Where'd you get the idea that anyone is sharing it among the admins? Most of the time, it's either just DU or me that even get to see this information in terms of PayPal notifications. And what we get to see is the name, surname and PayPal e-mail. Not exactly very identifiable. To my knowledge, none of it has ever been shared outside the two of us. So, yea, "carelessly"? Huh?

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...elisk-raffle-prizes.81960/page-4#post-2590121
"The fact that all the Codex admin can see your PayPal email is somewhat disturbing."
"Name and address in some instances."

Unless Kosmonaut was mistaken, but DU didn't seem to contradict his statement re: all admin. If it is in error, then good.

All of Codex is classified as a forum since that gets it some leeway in terms of extremely low click-throughs, but even so it's been bumped off several advertising providers for having below what what they accept as minimum allowed click-throughs considering the amount of ads served. Coupled with AdBlocking being the norm among non-Patrons, there's really not much to wonder about. The people who do see ads never click them and most of the rest usually block all of them.

Independent gaming sites as a rule get the crappiest ad rates possible due to very low amounts of clicks (not to mention mostly low-quality available advertising), but Codex is in a league all of its own, even compared to my site and the other hosted ones.

Codex is definitely different. I haven't seen RPGWatch needing to do much in the way of fundraising, NMA never had a problem even when its traffic ramped way up in Fallout's peak traffic days, and a site like GameBanshee is very comparable to Codex in traffic but is actually profitable (but it also uses much more intrusive ads and is on one of the videogaming's better ad networks, and it's not a forum for either ad or server usage purposes).

I stopped using AdBlock a while back as I realized what a dickish thing it is to do even if you whitelist all your frequently visited sites (which I already did). Codex audience is probably way too cynical to sell them on the need of not using AdBlock or at least whitelisting your favorites. Maybe instead of a fundraiser, you guys should have a "whitelist Codex week".