Archived A small update about activity & Patreon campaign?

Hello my friends and dear users,

in the last time I wasn't really active on the wiki & forum due to several reasons.
I have a lot of stress with work which is keeping me busy and my freetime at home was very limited. Most of the time I was spending time with my girlfriend or online on YouTube or World of Warcraft, tried out new games and became a little bit lazy around my own projects I raised up before. I also gained additional stress from depressions and my own personal financial problems due to higher costs I had to pay for energy, rent, etc..
Anyway, i had to deal with a lot of things and I still have some problems I have to deal with but I'll try my best until I don't have to worry about them anymore.

I don't want to keep stuff on the wiki unfinished. You guys were really awesome by creating new pages and uploading files to the wiki and I wasn't really able to implement your content properly. I really have to change that.
About the facebook page, I'm glad I have such an awesome mod like OverReAction. Seriously, since he started working on the wiki as mod he created a lot of cool graphics and now he's responsible for about 95% of all content which was posted on facebook the last months, so I upgraded him to a co-admin on the facebook page. He also gained access to the twitter acc of the wiki.
I really need to thank all of you for staying active in the forum, on the wiki, facebook and twitter. Thank you for being such a great community.



For the last reason of this post I was just thinking about the patreon website. It's a website like kickstarter where you're able to support creators of any kind of content. You can choose how much you want to spend and can support your choosen creators monthly.
Anyway, first to be clear: The wiki and the forum are just hobbies for me and I never planned to and never will make a money machine out of it. I tried some stuff with small ads in the past to earn a bit money for costs I have with the wiki & forum but the functionality of ads are very limited on wikispaces so it's not working well. Most of html-code required for ads is blocked by wikispaces and i'm very picky if it comes up to things like that. I don't want to use anoying popups or stuff where you need to find a small "X" button to close it, so I won't use ads for the wiki.
Here's a very small list of costs I have regarding wiki & forum:

- projectdiva.net URL : 12 EUR (~14$) per year
- projectdiva wiki plus subscription : 4.95 EUR (~5$) per month
- brsthegame wiki plus subscription : 4.95 EUR (~5$) per month

You see, I pay about 130 EUR (~135$) per year to keep the wikis alive. Since wikispaces removed the feature of having "free" wiki plans, i need to subscribe to either the "plus" or the "super" plan to keep them active otherwise they become inaccessible. That's the reason why I had to merge all different languages into one wiki for example, because I can afford 10$ for 2 wikis but not 40$ for 8 wikis per month. Suyo is using his own server for the forum, so I don't have to pay for server costs since Suyo is earning a bit money from the small ad-frame on the bottom of the forum and the fact he's using the server for his own projects and website as well. (Funfact: The ProjectDIVA.net forum is actually hosted in a subdirectory of his website and can be also accessed with this url: http://www.greencouchgames.net/000projectdiva/ )
I always paid those 130 EUR from my own money and I don't really have a problem with doing so but at this time I'm not able to host giveaways or contests like the Project DIVA Extend contest back then where I gave away 5x Project DIVA extend for PSP which I also paid from my own money.

So I was thinking about the possibility to setup a patreon page and wanted to ask for your opinion first before I think more about it. As you can see I don't really need that much to keep the site alive but bigger projects aren't possible at the moment.
I was even thinking about possible "rewards" like additional User Groups on the forum with "Patreon Supporter" as default rank (you would be still able to have your own custom rank) and one of 6 Special colors for the usernames matching your favourite Vocaloid. Another possible "reward" would be access to giveaways I could do with earnings I don't need to pay for the wiki costs. I don't even expect you to spend 50$ or something like that every month, small amounts like just 1$ is already enough but that would be your own choice anyway, it's totally up to you. I wouldn't even use earnings from patreon for myself but maybe I could spend a small part of the earnings to active mods like ORA to thank them for their hard work and assistance.

But hey, you're the community so I ask for your opinion about that. Should I start it? What could I also offer as "rewards" for patreon supporters? What kind of thoughts do you have?

 

Be sure, we won't disappear! ^^ It's just that I'm thinking about patreon so I don't have to pay all costs by myself because right now i can only pay just the costs for the websites but not for stuff like contests and stuff. Also it would be nice for the wiki to host it on a new url in the future with an own wiki engine so we won't have to stay with wikispaces forever. An own wiki engine would also give more possibilities than a third-party-host. So, don't worry, the wiki and the forum will stay alive no matter what.