Sooo
let us spend our bucks to keep antville alive. Only, you people...tell us where to drop the money. I am tired of reading threats of crying people, which are not finding a home in our village. I don´t want to loose my home here. You see, we want to spend, so give us a way to get you the bucks. And how Meisterköchin said, Merchandising could be an idea...thinkin´bout it since a longer time.
meisterkoechin
Gimme mousepads!
Gimme pens!
Gimme T-shirts, Sweatshirts, Baseballcaps and Underwear!
Gimme cups!
Gimme key fobs!
Gimme baking-tins!
Ernsthaft.
Konkret sehe ich drei Möglichkeiten um an Geld zu kommen:
1. Spenden
2. Werbung
3. Verkauf von antville-Souvenirs.
Am Aufwändigsten ist sicher 3. Es sei denn, eine Firma übernimmt den ganzen Ablauf. Dann wird allerdings der Erlös geschmälert.
Zu Punkt 1. ist zu sagen: Wer spenden will, muß akzeptieren, daß er keine Quittung kriegt. Das wurde hier schon mal erwähnt. Man kann die Scheine als Einschreiben an Euch senden, damit das Geld nicht verloren geht. So können sich zehn zB Wiener AntvillerInnen zusammentun und gemeinsam 100 € schicken. Oder dgl.
Zu Punkt 2. Ist sicher nicht besonders aufwändig. Allerdings, wer will in seinem Zuhause von Werbung berieselt werden? Das macht ja antville so geil (Pardon), daß die Berieselung nicht passiert.
Ich denke, es braucht vielleicht jemanden, der sich um die Startphase des Finanzierungsprojektes kümmert. Spenden sind sicherlich am einfachsten zu handhaben, v.a. wenn es cash ist und keine Schecks. Aber ich denke nach der Startphase wird die Finanzierung kein Problem mehr darstellen.
jeanluc
wofür merchandising, wenn das problem zu großer zulauf ist.
das erzeugt einen haufen verwaltungs und finanzbedarf, das ist doch keine pop band für kiddies hier.
spenden auch scheise, weil keine deckungsgarantie und immer nur die selben zahlen und die meisten immer nicht...
das kann man mit 5 guten kumpelz machen, aber mit 2000 stimmen da die lockeren verhätnisse nicht.
--
eben beschränken auf eine zahl an logs und mb. wer zuviel bilder hat muß hinten löschen anfangen. wers zu lange nicht nutzt fliegt raus, ein neues wird frei. limitierter support. widdersehn.
nach außen offene version geht dann nur mit bezahlen, daß man den kram halt laufen lassen kann.
realistisch gesehn gibts nur die beiden möglichkeiten. auf den rahmen begrenzen, so wie Ihrs früher mal andachtet oder eben so daß sich das stete wachstum selbst trägt und keinem wehtun soll.
hns
Thanks, your support is much appreciated. I think we'll set up a way of sending us donations soon.
However, I want you to understand that Antville's future does not depend on some money to buy hardware. I'm sorry if I gave that impression in my postings the other day. Yes, hard disk space is getting tight on the server, and yes, this has been causing me real headache (I've been manually erasing log files and database dumps to keep things working). But even here, getting the hard disks is a minor problem compared to the work of setting them up at the server. People who have been in a server room at 5 in the morning know what I'm talking about. Imagine standing inside a fridge with the sound of 1000 vacuum cleaners in the air. But as I said, this is not the main concern.
What is the problem then? I'll try to explain by telling you a story. Yesterday, I had already technically reopened Antville.org to let people create new weblogs. The problems that had haunted us have been solved (it seems) and so this was the right thing to do. But then, just as I was going to announce this here on help.antville.org, it dawned on me that something was not right. First, I needed to have a real weekend. If I may say so, I've managed an big workload over the last three weeks since Antville.org first went downhill, and me myself and my private life have somewhat suffered from it. If I was going to reopen Antville, I would have to at least keep Antville server performance in a corner of my eye. I simply could not stand to to this.
But even more critical than that was the fact that by reopening Antville, we were creating new dependencies and putting new responsabilties on our responsability-bent sholders. See, the problem is not the few dozen new weblogs each day. The problem is the one or two weblogs each day which actually start a life and get to rely on our service - now and even more as time goes by, since weblogs grow more valuable over time.
Note that this accumulation of responsabilty is not what we headed out to achieve when we started antville - quite the opposite. We wanted to create software that would people allow to host their own small or large clusters of weblogs, instead of relying on some huge weblog megalopolis like blogger.com. But it seems like we got it wrong and were on our way to become just another weblog megalopolis. Which obviously has to do with the fact that promoting software by doing hosting is like trying to sell dry bread by giving away steaks (or tofu burgers, for you vegetarians) (or Schnitzelsemmeln, for you Viennese).
Anyway, we did not mean to become the Deutsche Telekom of weblog hosting, and it is crazy that people are already approaching us like we are, like they are our customers and we owe them some service.
All that said, I don't yet know how we'll go on. We do have a few wonderful options at our hands. One is to keep Antville free, but limit new weblog creation to people who have been us for some time (e.g. registered more than half a year ago, or before some fixed date, e.g. 2002/August/01. I personally like this variant a lot, since it would make sure people are really part of this when they settle down here. It would also allow older Antvillians to create weblogs for friends, which would strengthen social cohesion between weblogs, help to make the new weblogs as fine as the ones we already have (that's a big issue) and prevent stagnation.
The other alternative is to take antville commercial, which would allow us to reap the full potential we have right now. I still haven't done the math on that yet, however - I don't even know how much traffic Antville is currently causing. I know of two companies who are currently thinking about offering commercial Antville hosting, so even if we don't do it ourselves, it's well possible that you get enhanced and supported Antville hosting in the not distant future.
Alright, I'm going back to weekend mode. I know I should have aired some of this earlier already, but it's not easy to nail things down while they're still flying around and you're standing knee-deep in a few thousand lines of code.
kris
i talked to some people who see a huge demand in antville hosting, but beyond weblogs. especially undercover antville sites would be really cool as groupware. people could share their idea, exchange private things, family photos, write books, do brainstorming etc. but not in public. antville can pretty much be used like a mailing list, but with the advantage of searchable archive, easy image upload etc.
maybe you could start charging for this kind of service. the downside is that non-public sites can be abused easily and so they need more administrational care.
robert
(first big thanks for keeping antville up and alive during the last three weeks - i just figured out what a workload that must have been, and i'm sorry for leaving you and tobi alone with that)
Which obviously has to do with the fact that promoting software by doing hosting is like trying to sell dry bread by giving away steaks
i have no idea how many antvilles are installed out there, but i'm convinced that starting antville.org was not a mistake. to be honest: we *knew* that antville.org would be successful (at least at some certain point), and we did everything we could to make antville and helma acknowledged pieces of software (and still do). i think our mistake was to *fully open* antville.org instead of keeping it as a pretty small place for us, friends and some more, as a "testbed" for the development of the software.
so what to do? honestly i'm not interested in bulk weblog hosting business, and fully reopening antville.org wouldn't solve any of our problems (even if we would accept donations or turn antville.org into a commercial weblog hosting service). i'm still convinced that changing antville.org's policy in the sense that creating new weblogs is only allowed for members who registered before a certain point or are "trusted" is the way to go.
this does not mean that we shouldn't turn helma into a "verein" or the like to accept donations (we must do that anyway), but i would prefer to make clear that these donations won't be used for turning antville.org in a weblog megalopolis but for the further development of the software.
if there are companies thinking about commercial weblog hosting based on antville and helma it's fine with me, and maybe we can help them (in exchange for donations). could also be that's naive, i don't know. anyway, i can't imagine myself being responsible for thousands of weblogs on antville.org, being responsible for the weblogs already hosted here is enough.
just to make it clear: i'm talking about bulk *weblog* hosting, but i'm pretty sure there is a demand for (commercial) website hosting based on antville. we already talked about that, and i think there were some pretty good ideas emerging. but that's a different topic and separated from antville.org.
(footnote: i'm pretty overwhelmed that so many people here are willing to donate, and i really appreciate it. thanks so much!)
JohnWalsh
It seems to me that the objectives of Antville were twofold. To develop an application using HOP and then allow people to freely use the Antville application on their own servers.
I have seen people ask for help installing Antville. Maybe you can spread the load to these servers or alternatively simply say Antville.org is full go to these Antville software sites via some link e.g. antville worldwide.
The original objective was to develop a product and not spend your time hosting/adminstrating a server. It seems to me there is a general consensus amongist the original developers that antville is full in the sense that you are spending too much time hosting rather than developing. If that is the case then stop taking new registrations.
I don't think its fair to continue to take new registrations and then at a future date say you must leave as you registered after such and such a date. The backdated dates suggested so far do not affect me but in principle I think its wrong to do this. Of course you could simply stop taking new registrations *now* until you make a final decision.
I am just giving my 2 cents worth, but at the end of the day its the original developers baby and they decide, but I do think you should consider stop accepting new registrations until you make a final decision.
when robert states HOP should take "verein" I assume he is talking about donations which is fair enough for the development of the software
D3
(sorry, but my english isn´t as well and i´m actually out of time to translate this, so i have to write in my and mr. hns native language german)
ich finde ebenfalls nicht, daß antville eine schlechte idee war und habe allerhand respekt vor ihnen und ihrer arbeit. antville und einige bestimmte antville-blogs sind mir im laufe der zeit ans herz gewachsen (wie zb ALO oder MKS).
wenn es möglichkeiten gibt, antville unter die arme zu greifen, will ich das gerne tun. alles, was in meinen kräften steht.
eine andere frage: antville selber ist doch eine xml-basierte software, oder? ist es möglich (und auch überhaupt erwünscht), daß man sich - sofern man auf eigenen webspace zurückgreifen kann -, selber sein eigenes antville-blog auf dem eigenen serverplatz weiß-der-geier-wo installiert? also antville in zwei formen: als gastgeber (wie gewohnt) und als gastprogramm (zum download). ich denke, das würde ihnen viel arbeit abnehmen...
mit den besten wünschen!
D3
robert
(i'm answering in english, hope that's ok for you, and although i'm not hns ;-).
first thanks for your nice words. we really appreciate your offer to help. regarding the antville (the software): antville is not "xml-based" (whatever that might be), but we're using xml (eg. all stories/comments are stored as xml in the database).
antville will be available for download in the moment we've released version 1.0 (which should happen within this month) - until then the latest version is only available in the versioning system of helma. it's not difficult to get the latest version out of the versioning system, but mostly developers are used to that.
but: antville is different from other weblog systems (like radio, moveabletype or the like) in the sense that you need a computer with permanent internet connection because (currently) there's no way to ftp the rendered contents of an antville-blog to a personal webspace somewhere. so if you install antville somewhere, the blogs will be hosted there and not somewhere else.
jeanluc
if you're not satsified with any solutions, close it.
internetblase im schnelldurchgang - ein bißchen.
D3
zufrieden. alle mann.