Where we're at today.

This is a cross-post from the Forums: ( https://refsheet.net/v2/forums/support/where-we-re-at-today----3-20-2020 )

I wanted to give everyone an update on where the site is today, and the direction it's headed to ensure the site can be truly self-sufficient while I seek out new work. It's hard times, but we've proven that we can come together as a community and support this work.

Thank you all, so much.

---

 

As many of you may have seen, I've been laid off from my day job. The impact of COVID-19 has been far greater than anyone could have anticipated, and the company had to make some extremely difficult decisions. I'm currently applying for other jobs, and doing all I can to keep my personal finances afloat, but it's an entire process.

I can comfortably say that with the recent increases in Patreon support, this website is finally close enough to self-sufficient that I don't need to fear a shutdown here as well. Refsheet, as a whole, only requires 2% of the users to pledge $5/mo or so to not only keep it self-sufficient, but to afford continuous, full-time development work.

In the grand scheme of things, 2% of the users is a really small mark to hit. Right now, Patreon memberships account for 0.6% of the current users on the site, so there is still a small way to go, but we're so much closer than we were even a few days ago. Your support during this tough time actually pulled me through the bad news unscathed.

I was in a really bad spot after I got the news. It's frightening that, in the face of global pandemic, everything you have can come crashing down to nothing. I've been adding up worse-case scenarios and the first concern that I had was losing this website. With your recent support, and ongoing support in the future, that won't happen. As long as Patreon memberships continue to grow, that can't happen. We're safe now, thank you.

Now, my tone is a lot more positive. We can do this. I'll find a way to make my personal life work out. I'm still a pretty stinkin' sad panda, and I probably will be for a while, but all we can do is move forward. So that's where we're at today.

A Focus on Financial Support

I realized in all this just how fragile Refsheet was. The site relied on my income to continue, and didn't have much of a means to support itself. I didn't want to push the matter--I was focused mainly on providing the best, free service I could. I realize that it is more important to instead develop a service that is also capable of keeping itself alive in the face of disaster, so some more hard decisions need to be made.

Several people have offered hosting alternatives, and when I discuss the specific requirements (see this Twitter thread) they universally realize that this site is more than just "a simple website." Moving to other hosting providers isn't an option, and I'm not just saying that because I'm stubborn, it truly is a whole piece of work. Our current host solves the security and reliability problems that are my #1 concern.

This is all tentative so far, but I wanted to you to know what I'm thinking in regards to generating site revenue so that it can operate without my own financial contributions. When you see any of these changes, understand that it's required for the longevity of the site. Financial support and revenue is not an optional bonus anymore given the scale of this site, it's a requirement.

Changes coming to Refsheet, Re: Finances

In order for this website to flourish, we need to exceed that 2% supporter mark. I also need to seek out other options for funding the site, including potential sponsorship and advertising. I drafted an on-site advertising module, as you can see in the sidebar, and have been using that to collect data. I'm going to be refining that, but also introducing other advertisement options.

Understand that my priority is still to provide a clean, beautiful website. I will carefully select the best placement and layout for ads to not intrude on your page, but maybe remind you of that thing on Amazon you forgot to buy.

In short, here are my proposed changes going forward:

Upload Throttling

The most expensive part of this site is uploading images. In an effort to keep the upload queue short, therefore preventing burst server usage and exceeding quotas, I will impose a daily image upload limit per user. This number will be calculated based on the 90th percentile data for user upload rate. If you exceed this rate, it will be reset after midnight (timezone pending), and you can continue uploads the next day.

Becoming a supporter on Patreon, or through any of the other available support routes, will remove this limit. I will provide one-time supporter options on site that allow you to remove limits for a month (probably $7).

This change will also reduce the possibility of spam-uploading, which I've thankfully only had to deal with once.

Advertising (on and off-site)

As mentioned, I'm working on adding advertising. A rough estimate showed that adding an Adsense module could possibly generate a not-insignificant amount of revenue for the site, and if that is true, it will greatly contribute to the expansion and further development of the site. As of now, though, I only estimate that to cover 1/5 of my target for this site's revenue, so donations are still, if not more, essential.

Forums, activity feed, character pages, and others will have an on-site advertising module (the one you see now) which will spotlight great things people within our community do. In addition, I will (if approved) add an Adsense module to the site.

Supporters will be able to disable the Adsense / 3rd party advertisements. I'm considering a higher support tier which will allow you to disable the ads on your own character pages, but haven't solidified that idea just yet.

Existing features remain free, new features may not.

All existing features, including character privacy settings, will remain free. The only thing that may change is the rate at which you can create that content. As of now, only image uploads are considered for throttling. I will not set hard limits on the amount of content you can have in total.

New features may be made available only to supporters as a thank-you reward for helping to fund the site, as well as a way to encourage more support. As of now, I'm considering the following options for supporters:

• Unlimited daily image uploads
• Option to make full-rez downloads available for your art
• Custom watermarking
• Community forum/discussion group creation
• Additional V2 profile widgetry
• Character data sync (FFXIV Lodestone, WoW Armory, etc.)

Is this a "paywall"?

Please, do not call it that. The requirement for funding is an unfortunate reality for every creator of every variety in this world. I truly wish to convey just how much the success and future of any website is tied to how much funding it has. Several larger sites are funded by some parent company, large advertising networks, premium features, etc. Refsheet is currently funded by Patreon, ko-fi donations, and previously the creator themself.

This site is, essentially, a place to store and host your characters. Keeping to that spirit, that functionality will forever be free.

How do I get supporter status?

There's a new footer at the bottom of every page explaining it, but you can get supporter status via Patreon and Ko-fi Donations. Patreon memberships are usually updated automatically within the site as soon as you pledge, and are the most reliable way to help the site grow. If you donate Ko-fi, please message me on site and I'll try and match up your info and add your one-time supporter status.

I've previously given supporter status for other, non-financial things. Keep an eye out on Twitter. You must remember, the happiness and sanity of the developer (henlo) is equally as important as funding for this site.

What I'm working on now:

The changes I mentioned above aren't going into effect immediately. I still have to spend hours coding it all up, and my immediate priority is finding a new job and keeping a roof over my head. Oh, and the whole auto loan + insurance + student loans + bills... Man, layoffs suuuck. (Related, if you want to donate to me, personally, I wouldn't say no :'D, mauabata@gmail.com is a PayPal inbox you can send that to.)

I'm currently continuing the same code I was working on before this mess: Unifying our JavaScript frontend to one single code package. I'm several thousand lines of code changes in, so I'm hoping to wrap that up SOON. It's one step closer to making the website less "Loading" and more "just show me the page, dambit".

And, this will also make new features move faster, since I won't be juggling two very different JavaScript packages.

Developers, halp!

Obviously, I can't afford to hire a developer yet. In fact, that's why this is a solo project. I believe that nobody should work for free. That said, I don't think I can hold myself to that anymore. I need help, and helping is entirely optional. If you want to volunteer some of your time to help develop the site and take care of issues I've got floating about my GitHub, here's some deets:

Stack:

• ReactJS 16
• Sass / SCSS
• Webpack almost-4
• Rails 6
• Docker + docker-compose
• Kubernetes
• GraphQL

The code is hosted in a private repository, which (with recent funding) I might be able to move to the Refsheet organization on Github! The core of this website is closed source; this is a security decision as well as a privacy concern for myself as the developer. Any new developers will have to pinky-swear that they won't share anything they see within the code.

If you are familiar with any of those stacks and want to help, let me know and I'll invite you to the Github repo. Development setup requires Docker and docker-compose, which I can help get you started with. That handles all the dependencies, assuming you're on a Linux machine, so you don't have to think about them. It also directly emulates our production servers, ain't that neat?

Once you make code changes, it's the usual open a PR process, your PR might end up on a staging server, and once merged it'll go live. Neat.

And that's it.

Once again, thank you for your continued support. I'm sorry the news lately hasn't been the best, and I feel kinda bad for these changes, but I want to make sure that even in the face of global pandemic, our website can continue to grow.

-- Mau