*bump* in the name of AndrewC :P

First of all thanks karacho for helping me bump this.

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It's that time of the year again, which means we're back to a monthly payment schedule for the server.

We're now raising money for the December to January payment which is due on the 4th of December. Yeah, it's shitty that they contacted me just now about it, especially since they reverted to a quarterly payment initially. Got that fixed and we're back to monthly.

The cost for this month is £12.21 which is roughly 19 USD.

Hope we'll manage to cover most of the costs this month and see you all on the server!

Donations can be made [url=http://bit.ly/gom-donate ]here[/url].

Spreadsheet says we still have 173 available. Is this incorrect?

Like, I understand that you still need to pay attention to the funds (outgoings > incomings is not good, obviously) but fund raising should be a year-round thing, rather than just worrying about it when the payment is due.

Unfortunately the spreadsheet is incorrect as it didn't account for the period we had HLStatsX installed on the server or the period they charged us for the Mumble server (I'm contesting this at the moment as they said it is free for 50 slots with each game server and hope to get a refund that is put forward towards the game server). I can provide the invoices for all of these.

Yeah, I've messed up with the spreadsheet mostly because I didn't update it almost ever after creating it, which defeats the whole purpose, nor did it took into account the auto-billing for the rest of the things (stats and apparently mumble), and I take full responsibility for that.

As for the fund raising to be a year round thing, yes, that's also true. The problem is that people in general aren't going to donate when there is still time left because they don't know how long they'll keep playing or if the server will be populated enough (that's why we started with a month-by-month payment scheme).

Thing is, after each donation drive is closed and the month is payed the next one is opened at that very time, I just don't advertise it. We've had the page up for this month ever since we made the big batch payment, I just wrote the new info text now and updated the price due to currency changes (it went up from $17 to $19).

I've been talking with the people that host our servers about a donate-to-server system which would make things more transparent and simple to manage, as I wouldn't intermediate between things, and even though they've shown interest in the idea it didn't end up implemented. Still hoping that it will get through though as I would rather have people pay in directly to the game hosting company rather than my own PayPal account.

Hope this clears things out as I don't want there to be any doubts about the whole server management thing.

Yet again, I take full responsibility for the lack of transparency and am open to suggestions on how to make this process easier for all those involved.

I would donate, but I really have to put a hold on all outgoing money for a while. :(

Heh, I'll try and donate and something. I have to save up right now to buy Christmas presents.

The host took us down. We reached the end of the billing cycle. I'm desperately trying to get a hold of AndrewC who for some reason is going back to his obscure continental European home only to find out he doesn't like it anymore and come back to England.

There aren't specific times to go on really, it's just if I'm on and nobody is there I'll post one.

(also we are based London (or were or something, whatever we're in Europe) so I'm not sure how fluent your connection will be)

The server is back up thanks to the donations from Dr. Repiv and Chuffy McFlannelslap.

Some changes are going to be made to the way we handle donations.

First of all, TheJoe/Tea has now access to the billing section of the account so that in situations when I'm not available due to whatever reason he can make payments; he can also grant new people access to the payment zone.

Second of all, I've made a new PayPal account dedicated only to the server and share the password to it with all the people who have access to the billing section. I also want to find a way to always show up to date funds available on that account (don't know exactly how at this point).

The email address associated with the PayPal account is gom.donate@gmail.com ; for now Tea and myself have access to them (the email account and PayPal).

I've also transferred the leftover funds to the new account and we have an outstanding balance of £2.55.

I'm sorry for all the shit I caused and am really taking every step that comes to mind to make similar situations not happen again.

Right now we've paid the month and the next payment date will be the 4th of January. As soon as I get my money I'll pay that month (January-February) to hopefully make up for the shit I've caused.

I've also started the donation drive for February-March. We're aiming for around $21 but I've left no maximum amount on it so we can get as much as we can. To donate just head on to the usual http://bit.ly/gom-donate (all the money will end up in the new account).

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Since winter is already here we've added some wintery maps on the server and made sure that they download if you don't have them already.

The maps are:
pl_badlands_winter
pl_badlands_xmas
pl_buzzards_canyon_snow
pl_buzzards_canyon_xmas
pl_hickory_gultch_winter
pl_hickory_gultch_xmas

Is there any chance a map pack can be uploaded somewhere again? I have the old one but a lot more maps have been added since and I'd rather get all the maps I need whilst I'm not gaming instead of having to wait for maps to download when I want to play.

I'm doing it as we speak. I'll update this post when it's done.

Excellent! :)

pl_buzzards_canyon_snow is broken, by the way. You can't cap the third(?) point.

Thanks! I'll take it off the server. I didn't get to the the maps to see if they actually don't have bugs in them unfortunately.
You can download the updated map-pack from here