@JasonWoof: I removed the $500 reward (since I doubt it'll be used anyway), and added a footnote to the advertisement goal.
@Buch: You're doing a lot for OGA already (as evidenced by the six pages of art on your user profile)! Thanks for all of your hard work. :)
@Sharm: There are a couple questions about your avatar reward. Can you hop on IRC today and send me a message so we can chat for a few minutes? If not, I can email you.
You already have my info and you know my intentions.
Haha, that sounds more ominous than it actually is. :)
Keeping up with answering questions is going to keep me pretty busy today, so it may turn out to be a day or three before I can get back to you. Thanks again for your help!
It should be noted that as long as I'm still doing my contract work (which could be many more months), anything over $2500 will go toward paying for art (probably a even a large portion of donations over $2000, honestly, but I don't want to guarantee that). The goal that I'm really shooting for at the moment is actually just $2000, which will allow me to work 20 hours a week on OGA. $5000 would be great, and I put that goal there because I don't want people to assume the campaign is over just because we got to $2000. The additional money can be put to use, as you said, by paying for art, while I'm not able to work the remaining hours.
As for the value of what I do compared to the value of a full-time artist, that's actually more difficult to quantify than what you're making it out to be. The site can hum along as it is with no improvements with just a couple days a month of total effort on my part. That being said, OGA isn't supposed to just be about people showing up at the site to download art. There are a lot of collaboration and community engagement features that we're missing out on right now just because there hasn't been time to code them. As for how much that will eventually be worth? I don't know. In the long run, it can make a huge difference.
Do you mind if I put that up as a reward on the official page? Just let me know the limit of how many you can reasonably do, along with the the latest date you can do them.
Part of the trouble with ads is performance and disk space. In order to give useful information to advertisers, I have to keep metrics, which means that I have to record every view of the ad along with every click on it. That way I can tell advertisers how many unique viewers have seen their ad, and what the click rate was.
Without running the ad, the homepage for people who aren't logged in is completely cached (it updates once every couple minutes), so it's very easy on the system. There's also the issue of database table sizes. When you're inserting hundreds of thousands of records a day, pretty soon the table gets huge and inserts start to slow down, which is one of the reasons advertisements are turned off right now. I could tune things better than the out-of-the-box Drupal module I'm using, but it's a lot easier on the site (and on our disk space) if we don't have them at all.
The other alternative is to go with an advrtising company and run their iframe, but then I don't get to screen the ads in advance for annoyances such as sounds or animation, or things like malware. Also, right now, OGA has no outside tracking cookies, which is really rare nowadays. When you visit here, Google Analytics doesn't know about it, Facebook doesn't know about it, Doubleclick doesn't know about it, etc. That's kind of a point of pride for me, so the whole idea of running outside ads is really unappealing.
Finally, and this is perhaps the most important reason I'd rather not run ads: The only people that I want to be beholden to are my users. If one company decided to buy up all my ad space, that would be huge, but then I'd likely start depending on that income, so that would put them in a position to pressure me to run OGA the way they want me to run it, rather than the way the users would like it run. I'm not comfortable with that.
I think that the funding goal of $2000/month is a little extreme. At that rate, it would be a second job for you, and that would be great I suppose, but as it is this site is more or less community-run.
You should check the feedback forum and read the backlog of bug reports and feature requests to see what all is needed, code-wise. To some extent, this site is able to run on its own, but frankly it's slow and buggy and there are a lot of things that people would like that I just don't have time to implement in my spare time.
If the cost is so great, I would recommend finding a way to reduce it.
The cost of letting the site "run itself" (into the ground) on its own is just the cost of the server. It needs a hefty box, and there's no reducing that. As for the rest of the cost, that funding is meant to take the place of the money I would receive from spending those hours on my regular contract work. I have a house, I have a wife and baby daughter, and I have bills to pay, and my asking price for those hours is already significantly less than what a lead Drupal developer/administrator for a medium to large site would be paid out in the work force. My wife is incredibly supportive of this project; she has a regular job and makes significantly more money than I do, and she's aware that I have the job skills necessary to make as much as she does, yet she has never complained that I'm going to be working for less money than I could be. On the other hand, if I suddenly cut my hours in half without some kind of way to fund that, we'd have trouble making our mortgage.
I get the feeling that you're under the impression that I'll be making more money than I am right now if the funding for OGA goes through, but I need to be clear about this: this isn't supplementary income, it's replacement income. I don't come out of this any richer; all I get from it is time to work on OGA without losing money every hour I spend not doing my hourly contract work.
Recruiting some quality volunteer site admins might be a solution.
I've already got a lot of people helping out, but here's the problem: Volunteers are volunteers. I can't afford to pay them, and often times volunteers discover that the work involved in maintaining the site is actually a lot more extensive than they thought it was. There are a number of administrators who can devote some time to helping out when they see spam, or art that needs to be edited in some way, or licensing issues, etc. On the other hand, really doing major work (running contests, curating art, etc) is a huge time commitment, and thus far no volunteer has been able to keep it up, and since I'm not paying them, it's not my place to force the issue. Given my experience running this site for the past 5 years, I can tell you that "just find some volunteers" is highly unrealistic, and it would be incredibly unfair of me to place those kinds of demands on my admins, who are willing to spend their time helping to run the site for free.
In conclusion, I'm sorry if I'm coming off as a little irritated. While it's true that OpenGameArt would be nothing without all of the incredible contributions from the community, I would like to believe that by running OGA I'm providing more than zero value to the FOSS and Indie gaming communities.
@JasonWoof: I removed the $500 reward (since I doubt it'll be used anyway), and added a footnote to the advertisement goal.
@Buch: You're doing a lot for OGA already (as evidenced by the six pages of art on your user profile)! Thanks for all of your hard work. :)
@Sharm: There are a couple questions about your avatar reward. Can you hop on IRC today and send me a message so we can chat for a few minutes? If not, I can email you.
You already have my info and you know my intentions.
Haha, that sounds more ominous than it actually is. :)
Keeping up with answering questions is going to keep me pretty busy today, so it may turn out to be a day or three before I can get back to you. Thanks again for your help!
@Sharm: Wow, that's really nice to hear. If OGA is a good home for artists, then I'm doing something right. :)
@Warspawn: You're awesome, thanks! :)
It should be noted that as long as I'm still doing my contract work (which could be many more months), anything over $2500 will go toward paying for art (probably a even a large portion of donations over $2000, honestly, but I don't want to guarantee that). The goal that I'm really shooting for at the moment is actually just $2000, which will allow me to work 20 hours a week on OGA. $5000 would be great, and I put that goal there because I don't want people to assume the campaign is over just because we got to $2000. The additional money can be put to use, as you said, by paying for art, while I'm not able to work the remaining hours.
As for the value of what I do compared to the value of a full-time artist, that's actually more difficult to quantify than what you're making it out to be. The site can hum along as it is with no improvements with just a couple days a month of total effort on my part. That being said, OGA isn't supposed to just be about people showing up at the site to download art. There are a lot of collaboration and community engagement features that we're missing out on right now just because there hasn't been time to code them. As for how much that will eventually be worth? I don't know. In the long run, it can make a huge difference.
Ah, that's a really awesome idea. :)
Also, this gives me a couple of ideas for art rewards that I can offer myself.
Sharm, you're awesome :)
Do you mind if I put that up as a reward on the official page? Just let me know the limit of how many you can reasonably do, along with the the latest date you can do them.
Part of the trouble with ads is performance and disk space. In order to give useful information to advertisers, I have to keep metrics, which means that I have to record every view of the ad along with every click on it. That way I can tell advertisers how many unique viewers have seen their ad, and what the click rate was.
Without running the ad, the homepage for people who aren't logged in is completely cached (it updates once every couple minutes), so it's very easy on the system. There's also the issue of database table sizes. When you're inserting hundreds of thousands of records a day, pretty soon the table gets huge and inserts start to slow down, which is one of the reasons advertisements are turned off right now. I could tune things better than the out-of-the-box Drupal module I'm using, but it's a lot easier on the site (and on our disk space) if we don't have them at all.
The other alternative is to go with an advrtising company and run their iframe, but then I don't get to screen the ads in advance for annoyances such as sounds or animation, or things like malware. Also, right now, OGA has no outside tracking cookies, which is really rare nowadays. When you visit here, Google Analytics doesn't know about it, Facebook doesn't know about it, Doubleclick doesn't know about it, etc. That's kind of a point of pride for me, so the whole idea of running outside ads is really unappealing.
Finally, and this is perhaps the most important reason I'd rather not run ads: The only people that I want to be beholden to are my users. If one company decided to buy up all my ad space, that would be huge, but then I'd likely start depending on that income, so that would put them in a position to pressure me to run OGA the way they want me to run it, rather than the way the users would like it run. I'm not comfortable with that.
Just woke up. :)
Bertram, Guarav, Quilmos, and GunCheloc, I really appreciate your help. :)
@Guarav: No need to sign up for a new account. You've got the OGA Supporter medal now. :)
Thanks!
I think that the funding goal of $2000/month is a little extreme. At that rate, it would be a second job for you, and that would be great I suppose, but as it is this site is more or less community-run.
You should check the feedback forum and read the backlog of bug reports and feature requests to see what all is needed, code-wise. To some extent, this site is able to run on its own, but frankly it's slow and buggy and there are a lot of things that people would like that I just don't have time to implement in my spare time.
If the cost is so great, I would recommend finding a way to reduce it.
The cost of letting the site "run itself" (into the ground) on its own is just the cost of the server. It needs a hefty box, and there's no reducing that. As for the rest of the cost, that funding is meant to take the place of the money I would receive from spending those hours on my regular contract work. I have a house, I have a wife and baby daughter, and I have bills to pay, and my asking price for those hours is already significantly less than what a lead Drupal developer/administrator for a medium to large site would be paid out in the work force. My wife is incredibly supportive of this project; she has a regular job and makes significantly more money than I do, and she's aware that I have the job skills necessary to make as much as she does, yet she has never complained that I'm going to be working for less money than I could be. On the other hand, if I suddenly cut my hours in half without some kind of way to fund that, we'd have trouble making our mortgage.
I get the feeling that you're under the impression that I'll be making more money than I am right now if the funding for OGA goes through, but I need to be clear about this: this isn't supplementary income, it's replacement income. I don't come out of this any richer; all I get from it is time to work on OGA without losing money every hour I spend not doing my hourly contract work.
Recruiting some quality volunteer site admins might be a solution.
I've already got a lot of people helping out, but here's the problem: Volunteers are volunteers. I can't afford to pay them, and often times volunteers discover that the work involved in maintaining the site is actually a lot more extensive than they thought it was. There are a number of administrators who can devote some time to helping out when they see spam, or art that needs to be edited in some way, or licensing issues, etc. On the other hand, really doing major work (running contests, curating art, etc) is a huge time commitment, and thus far no volunteer has been able to keep it up, and since I'm not paying them, it's not my place to force the issue. Given my experience running this site for the past 5 years, I can tell you that "just find some volunteers" is highly unrealistic, and it would be incredibly unfair of me to place those kinds of demands on my admins, who are willing to spend their time helping to run the site for free.
In conclusion, I'm sorry if I'm coming off as a little irritated. While it's true that OpenGameArt would be nothing without all of the incredible contributions from the community, I would like to believe that by running OGA I'm providing more than zero value to the FOSS and Indie gaming communities.
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