That is all.
Just kidding, as you might have noticed, recently RMRK's had some instabilities. It just crashed tonight, right before I was going to sleep. Good thing I caught it else I'd only be posting this tomorrow afternoon otherwise.
The problem is that RMRK is outgrowing its server. RMRK runs on a VPS, which stands for
Virtual Private Server. Essentially, a big beefy server is split up into smaller virtualised servers, each independent with their own resources and so on. It's a great way to get the performance of high class server hardware (RMRK is served from a server with 15k rpm RAID 10 drives with sixteen CPUs, no kidding), without the unreliability of a dedicated server built from commodity parts.
Lately as RMRK has gotten bigger and busier, the resources required to store, search, sort and serve everything have gone up also. I've actually impressed some nerds with what I'm managing to squeeze out of my current plan. But the boundries of those resoures are now often being stepped on, resulting in the instability.
Switching to SMF2 has helped, and so will the upcoming rewrite of the code behind crankeye.com (as well as new features), but RMRK is still in the orange/red
RMRK currently runs on the "Essential" plan. As you can see, the next one up has
double the memory, and memory is what is in short supply for RMRK. It also happens to cost nearly twice as much though.
Along with support from various members, I've paid thousands of dollars over the years towards running RMRK, and will continue to do so. $90 a month for RMRK is a bit of a pinch though.
At this point, one or two users might chime in and be kind enough to donate notable sums. I'd ask that you don't. Instead, perhaps we could try something else. Along with the recent forum upgrades is a subscription based one. Imagine if instead of one person donating double figures, instead it was spread out by multiple people with figures that were individually tiny, but together were quite formidable.
This is where the idea for RMRK+ comes from. The price is set at $3, and it lasts 4 weeks. Why $3? Any lower and the cut paypal takes becomes an even more ridiculous percentage of the total than it already is.
Before you go worrying that the plus sign means that features will get restricted and so on - don't. It's always been a mantra of RMRK to never limit anything and give everything to everybody, and that won't ever change. However, that does of course make it more of a double edged sword, making for less incentive to donate. Only frivolous things such as a badge or custom userbar (sup anski) could be possible.
At the moment this is just a test; depending on how it works out we could be on double the RAM and smooth sailing by tomorrow night. Any suggestions are welcome.
Also, if anybody does this, please post your experience using it. It doesn't let me test redundant payments.
Discord
Light Style