SoylentNews

This is a quick blurb about our financials last year and looking forward.

Last year we comfortably paid expenses and reduced our server costs. We ended up paying more for tax prep than originally was estimated, but we exceeded our funding goals by enough to afford that with a little breathing room. I'm optimistic this year will be similar, if not better overall; I believe that tax-costs will be lower, and we have no large expenses planned. Here is a rough breakdown of where the money is going:

• 54% Hosting/Backups/Domains
• 37% Taxes/Accounting
• 9% Administrative/Other

It's obviously frustrating that such a large amount of where we spend money is on taxes, but we should see that number come down as we mature.

Moving forward I'll be estimating all expected costs on a yearly basis, and then still continuing with goals on a half-year funding periods; this should make things more consistent and easier to understand. As usual I'll link to the current funding breakdown on the wiki from the beg-o-meter. My estimate is that we will spend about $6,000 this year, so that puts the beg-o-meter at $3,000 for each half. Thanks again for all of the support we receive that keeps this such a cool community for everyone.

Hello fellow Soylentils!

We were informed by Linode (our hosting provider) that they needed to perform Xen updates on all of our servers. This forces a reboot of our virtual servers which may cause the site (and other services) to be temporarily unavailable.

Here is the two-day reboot schedule along with what runs on each server:

As we found some errors with our MySql setup during the last Xen updates, The Main Site will be down starting at 2015-12-14 at 0300 UTC while we reconfigure MySQL prior to the shutdown of the main MySQL server helium. The site should be up by 0500 UTC.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience and appreciate your understanding as we try and get things up and running following each reboot.

So, every once in awhile, if things have been quiet, I like to pop a post seeing what the general feelings of the community are towards the site, seeing what we could do better, etc. I think its been a few months since the last time I posted in Meta, so I think this is a good time to get a pulse on the community, and provide a venue to get any feedback (good or bad).

On the staff side, I know things have been relatively quiet over the summer due to most of us being busy with life and such, which is why we haven't made a major site upgrade since the original rehash upgrade at the end of May. For myself, I've been working at a new job, and dealing with a fair bit of non-Soylent related things to the point that I really only have the time or energy to post, and occasional check in, and I'd like to thank the rest of the staff, and mrcoolbp in particular for holding down the fort for me.

Anyway, in contrast to my usual posts, I'm going to cut this off here, and will be looking forward to your comments below.

73 from NCommander

Sometime recently, something in our setup (or in the bitpay API) changed and left us unable to receive notifications of bitcoin payments. The bad news is the payments still went through but the subscriptions were not rewarded on SoylentNews. We realized the error and credited the accounts (there were only 4 such cases) giving extra subscription time to make up for the error.

Bitcoin subscriptions are temporarily disabled until we can work out exactly what happened and avoid it in the future.

Thank you, and our apologies for any inconvenience.

~mrcoolbp and TheMightyBuzzard

Thanks to all of our wonderful supporters, we have exceeded our financial goal for this period! This period covers the second half of 2015, so we still have a few months before this period is over. Up until now, the only thing we have budgeted for was immediate and expected expenses (hosting, tax preparation, domain registrations, etc.). While we have been luckily staying ahead of these projected expenses by a small margin (about 10% in the first half of the year), it appears we have an opportunity to exceed the goal set for this period. Subsequently, we had the idea of a stretch goal. There are quite a few things that we could use this money for (not for more more servers.)

One of the biggest "expenses" that we rarely discuss is the initial capital outlay that went into the site's startup costs — $3,417 coming out of the personal accounts of our staff. Of course, we aim to reimburse these sizable contributions. Though they have noted that they wished us to first focus on making the site self-sustaining, it appears we are already doing that.

Another possible use for "extra" funds would be to have some money on hand for lawyers. We often talk about how any kind of lawsuit or legal proceedings would be a huge financial burden on us. We do try to avoid any case that may invite that; for example, we are registered for DMCA requests, we take steps so that we are not breaking laws here in the USA (etc.). However, even if we are following the laws/guidelines exactly, that does not rule out the possibility of a lawsuit, so it would be ideal that we had some funds in case such a situation ever arises.

Further down the road we would love to be able to compensate some of our dedicated — and so far entirely volunteer staff — many of whom have been working tirelessly on this site since it went live; taking time away from their lives and families so that we can have this community. This is a "for the future" thing. It would have its own quirks and issues that we would have to figure out. It's a nice-to-have-problem in case we ever do have the extra capital. Surely, having a few paid employees, at least, would help ensure the long-term viability of the site, as well as open up the opportunity to really improve and expand on what we are trying to do here.

For this stretch goal we are aiming for an additional $2,000. This should cover any unexpected costs that come up in the way of taxes for last year (yes, we are still working to finish up the filing for last year) and give us a buffer that we could just leave in the bank for now. If things continue financially in this direction (or even grow), then we can start to use this money to begin to pay back the the startup costs for the site, and keep a few dollars on hand for things that come up in the future.

I also wanted to mention that we are working on getting direct credit card payments possible through Stripe for those that prefer not to use PayPal. Though we don't have a timeline yet, it is in the pipeline.

Once again, I am personally astounded by the support that we have seen since we went live in February of 2014: over a quarter-million comments as well as all the submissions, volunteers, and subscribers — the feeling of being a part of this is hard to describe. So thank you all for being you.

-mrcoolbp