In September 2006 this website was suspended by my hosting company for exceeding bandwidth. This wasn't anything new to me, it had been suspended many times before. The R.O.D. sampler was causing a lot of traffic on the server, thus having pushed my allowance 53 gigabytes past the limit, the website was suspended again. Except this time it was different. My hosters were going to charge me $3 U.S. dollars for each gigabyte exceeded. It ended up being a $157 fine. Considering this was more than half of what I usually pay for over a year's time of hosting service and they had only sent out a warning e-mail regarding approaching the limit the night before they suspended the website the next morning, I was pretty pissed off! It went offline for two weeks until I mustered up the money but I was still bitter considering I only make around $5 bucks an hour at my job, it was about thirty hours of work wasted on something that I shouldn't of had to pay for.
I had never accepted money donations before, never bothered setting up a paypal link or anything like that in the past; I just didn't feel like I needed it, and I didn't because I don't mind working to support the website myself, until this happened. This was unfair, and I felt I could use some help.
I set up some donation links, and magically, in only two weeks I not only had enough money to cover what was borrowed to pay that damned penalty fee - I had enough spillover to cover some more website expenses! The service brought in exactly $350 gross. Where did the money go? I covered the overspill fee (-$157), paypal fees (-$28.53) for providing the donation links, Vbulletin license renewal (-$30), and I renewed the domain name renewal (-$65)! So I not only covered the penalty fee AND renewed the forum license for another two years and the domain name for another five, I also had $69.47 dollars left. I promised all money donated would go to the website, which it did, and the leftover inevitably will be used for supporting the website as well.
Top donor was Musasabi, who donated $40 bucks! I told him that in theory, considering the Vbulletin license cost me $30 a year, he had practically just bought the forum. I made him a moderator again instead of handing over the keys, fair enough.
Forum users subn3gro and D4damage both donated $20 respectively. Awesome! Nerus donated $15.
Four people donated $10; David Sterken, Jan (well he owned in the R.O.D. sampler, so he kind of owed me hahahaha!), Snake of the New age Ninjas, and Fabian who was the only person who sent the money in an envelope across the Atlantic ocean!
Jason Finney and Julio Lucatero both donated $6 bucks respectively. Most users contributed with a $5 donation. They include Anfeyd, Tatsumaru, George Howard, Richard Hesmondhalgh, Lilian Mederos, Gilles Schaeck, Bob Galvan, Jaguarfiend, Custum of Xendynasty, Michael Brooke-Taylor, gr8_mike, Jacob Anderson, Gareth Stubbs, Daniel J Cudlip, John Funck, Erufukami, Zhou Wua Tsien, Mark Bewsher, Luke from trickingforum.com, Adam Lagler, Kris Markmann, Jonas Björk, Regan Gallagher, Bradley Raley, Sean Alveari, Geoff Livingstone, Alexander Peerman, Shidosei, Christopher Garcia, Tobias Hermann, Falco van Hoorn, Jonathan Nease, Adam Wehmann, Jamesters, Justin Cataldo, Spencer Mar, Dylan Hedges, and Meegz of Team FS.
The smallest donation is still a donation. Andrew Wielochowski donated $2; Those who contributed $1 include Marc-André Brochu, Bernadette Mc Court, Guillaume Ouellet, Alpha7158, Samuel Lee, Randy Mintz, Thomas Jurkiewicz, Tyler Ferraro, Christopher Garcia, Diana from Team FS, Matt Swartz, Ian Shields, and my sister.
Others had mentioned that they wished to donate, fortunately for those who were late I closed the donation when October rolled around so they did not have the opportunity to scoff up their hard earned money!
Anybody who donated should feel a sense of ownership and belonging to our tricking community and this website. When I was getting the donation confirmations during this fundraiser, I saw them as people who wanted to see this place continue to exist; I feel the same way. I still really want to keep this place going. I want to extend out a very strong THANK YOU to all those who made this fundraiser a success. You guys are what make this place what it is!