Blue Phoenix Ace

Hi there! I do believe my shared hosting was much lower cost than the cloud hosted service. I had used Lunarpages which got bought by HostPapa. Seems like in total, I spent about $250 in maintenance per year, which is a much lighter burden than currently, which appears to be roughly $1000. In all honesty, whoever takes up the admin role should assume they will get zero donations. Be happy if you do get some, but don't count on it. For those of you who are crypto savvy, you might consider that as a donation option. It's much less hassle than credit cards. And, I want to thank @Momo for their hard work since taking the site over from me. I think it's been... two years now?

Yeah, I can't reproduce it. It comes and goes...

For some reason I was unable to post a new thread in the admod forum. I got an error that the title and post were blank even though they werent. Let's see if I can post here.

There will soon be a new sheriff in town. If the sheriff wants to hire some deputies, that's up to them.

For those who have subscribed to this thread, this is a bump to let you know to go ahead and vote here:

I'm not sure you're reading this thread Momo. So, here's the deal. There is no longer any deal with AVEN. It is not a safety net or backup plan for us now, and I don't see us bridging the gap of opinion in the next week. I'm going to lock this thread for now, let y'all cool off a bit. Tomorrow, I'll be posting a new thread with some exciting news about the election for administrator.

@Momo is one of the two candidates I'm considering. @Phoenix the II is the other. I'll have more details tomorrow.

OK, this is not the response I expected, but I respect what you all are saying. AVEN will become a backup plan if nobody else can get it working. I've already got a couple of candidates from inside the community and I'm just waiting until the end of day to see if any more volunteer. I plan on holding a general election between the candidates so you all can vote for your favorite.

If any of those reasons are a deal breaker, it would be better if I knew sooner rather than later. So, please just PM me. What if the link between the two is not obvious? If these forums still appeared under its own URL "www.arocalypse.com", then where would the confusion be? Arocalypse would continue to be maintained as a separate set of forums, with its own unique membership. That is, registering for AVEN doesn't get you an Arocalypse account, or vice versa. So, rather than being seen as a sub-category, it would remain its own entity in most respects. What if the administrator on the new infrastructure was one of our own, just that the backend of the web hosting was handled by AVEN? And the moderators are elected by the Arocalypse community. I don't understand. What kind of new bullshit would Arocalypse be exposed to that is is not already? What does this mean, exactly? Because if "being inclusive of aros even if they do not primarily identify as ace" is considered a core value of Arocalypse, well, in many people's experience it sure ain't a core value of AVEN. I understand that's vague. We didn't discuss every last detail of that statement, but Arocalypse would still maintain its own Terms of Service. As for core values, it's for example being respectful of others, don't harass people, etc. That's already baked into our Terms of Service. What AVEN is saying is we can't edit the Terms of Service to say "you can threaten to beat people up and that's OK" (as an extreme example). We're already agreeing with the core values of AVEN, just with a slightly different flavor in that our focus is romantic orientation while theirs is sexual orientation. My key takeways here are: The link between AVEN and Arocalypse should not be obvious, Arocalypse should still use a unique domain name Any new leadership for Arocalypse needs to be chosen by the community of Arocalypse

I've got some good news. I spoke with a member of the Project Team from AVEN and shared some technical stats about this site with them. One scenario is that AVEN would take over the site as an affiliate forum. For the most part, Arocalypse would maintain it's autonomy. We'd have separate Terms of Service, and bans would not transfer between sites automatically. That being said, the AdMod teams of the forums might share information with one another in case bans are very serious. (A stalker who gets banned on one forum would automatically get a ban on the other). The key here is that the community here on Arocalypse would remain in control of its own rules and culture, as long the core values between the two forums remain similar. I understand some of you would feel uncomfortable with this type of merge, and you probably wouldn't speak out in that way publicly. If you have concerns about this approach that you don't want to air publicly, please send me a private message. The benefit of a handoff to AVEN is: Stable funding Stable leadership Stable platform (even more stable than what I've provided) I have agreed that if this happens, I'll stay on as administrator for a few months to help with the transition. Any thoughts on this, good or bad, please let me know. Thanks!

I'm not sure about CPU load or network bandwidth. My web host takes care of all of that for me. I think running it from a home machine is probably a bad idea overall, as it's much more likely to have downtime. (You lose power and the site goes down, but that can't happen with a web host) As for server costs, I'd be happy to pitch in for the first year for the new owner once they've demonstrated they can run the site. (I'm not handing 300 bucks to someone who claims they'll run the site and then run off with the cashola) So, I know that's kind of a catch 22 there. You need money to get it going but you need it going before I fund you.

What? Arocalypse will soon be approaching it's 4th birthday on April 3rd, 2016. Unfortunately, it's not quite going to make it, unless you decide to take over. I am stepping down as system administrator as some annual fees are due in soon, and I'm ready to hand it over to the next enthusiastic person. When? The last day Arocalypse will be online in its current form is March 29th, 2020. Why? I started Arocalypse as a place for aromantics and greyromantics to have focused discussion about their romantic orientation. I wanted such a place to fill that gap. There had been a previous site with the same name started by @Mezzo Forte. I decided to use the same name so all the formerly broken links to this site would work again. Personally, I only visit the site to take care of problems, never to take place in the discussions. I've been happy to "keep the lights on" thus far, but the technical issues have been a bit of a drag lately, and frankly I'm tried of the background worry. I do some small amount of Google ads to help draw traffic here, but that's been on auto-pilot and I don't give it the attention it needs. I think someone with more interest in the community and more energy could do more with this site. Better advertising would be a good start. A store to buy aro-related merchandise would be great too. I just lack the interest in doing much more than keeping the status quo. What can I do? If you're interested in keeping the site running as the system administrator, you'll need to know (or be willing to learn) about the technologies that drive it: Domain registration Web site hosting Invision power suite (the forum software) I'd estimate I pay around $250-$300 annually to keep it all running. An annual fund raiser or a Patreon account should have no trouble paying the fees, and potentially upping the advertising investment to drive more incoming traffic. If you think you can do this, please send me a private message here, or on AVEN (with the same name). I'm going to screen applicants, and make the best choice for a successor. I can then pass you the database, the password, and create an admin account for you to get you up and running on the new site. Thanks! Thanks again for making the community such a wonderful place. All I did was build the house, but you all made it a home. More questions? Please respond to this thread, I'm listening.

I'll look into it. I'm not sure if that's a feature of Invision or not. Encryption is useful when dealing with sensitive information. For example: credit cards numbers or identifying information such as social security number. Email addresses are not identifiable, so the concern is low. You can fake all of the information when you create an account, except for email address. But you can obtain a fake email address from Yahoo for free. None of your account information is identifiable unless you opt in and include it by choice. (For example, your name could be an alias or just made up) As for forum posts, it is all publicly readable, so there's nothing to hide there. If you are concerned that a " man in the middle" or XSS attack might occur and intercept private messages, then you can conduct private messaging over email or some other secure method. If we wanted to open a shop here and sell aro themed pride clothes, then I would 100% add a certificate, but otherwise, I don't see a compelling reason for it.

OK, I added section 2m to the ToS to take a clear stance on this type of offense. I will not retroactively assign warnings for past posts that broke this rule, but future instances will be warned. I've also hidden the original post, and am going to lock this thread down. If you have more questions, feel free to PM me. Also, be sure to visit the moderator elections subforum.

If you go to a public space and ask someone for their opinion, and they give it to you, then what harm has been done? If the asker is that sensitive, then they shouldn't be asking folks who they think will give them a callous answer. If the response is insulting in ways that don't relate to the question or discussion, such as "you're dumb", then that's a warning per usual. So, yes, if you throw gasoline and end up getting burned, it's partially on you at that point. OK, I figured it out, but it's not intuitive...