Excess Donation Funds?

[CriscoCube]

I actually have about 1 report per 10 hours played in the server, so I def. play more than I report. All of my reports include video evidence, they are indisputable.

I'm not interested in being an admin, nor have I ever suggested it. That is not what this post is about, I simply asked what is being done with the extra donation money, and somehow the people here have decided to troll and make it into a big thing....

If you want to post screenshots of conversations I can go there too, lets start with how you tried to lie to me once I posted this forum thread:






Seems to me your the one who's trying to cause drama, when I simply was curious about where donation funds were being allocated.

So tell me, why is it every time I ask a very simple question, most of the admins, and many regulars are complete trolls and hostile? Instead of wanting to improve the community you tear down any idea or question that is raised... pretty much re-affirms why I stopped using bZ discord... the only answer I can come to is that banzore has a toxic vocal minority, which sadly includes several admins such as yourself. Granted its still better than the only other HC rush option which is GMH, but that is primarily because Neo is a great admin and tries to keep the commuity positive and in a good direction... but comparing to GMH is an extremely low bar, and I think bZ can do a lot better... but when a simple question like I asked in this thread turns into some weird drama due to admins trolling and lying... maybe I was wrong and this is as much as bZ will ever be.

 

[-bZ-AngrySalsa]

Hey, you can't say i didn't try.
Felt that posting the whole convo was redundant.
Would you like a refund? Got plenty of our members offering to pay your donations...

 

[dougandbugs]

Honestly if someone gives me 30 bucks I'll take a year long break from BF4, I'm having ucav dreams again and need a long break.

 

[-bZ-AngrySalsa]

This isnt the Oprah Winfrey show

 

[CriscoCube]

I'm curious as to why you see reporting people for griefing is a bad thing? Should we just ignore people teamkilling tanks, mortars, equipment or otherwise? You prefer a server where anyone can teamkill and grief as much as they want? Or is it that you don't like being an admin and doing what you volunteered to do? That much is clear considering griefers run rampant in 7 with nearly no action or action days after the fact.

I started this thread asking about where donations go, and some thoughts on how to build the community... and that community instead shits on any suggestions for improvement and trolls me instead. Somehow you turned this into a totally different conversation that emphazies how toxic the community is. Amazing.

 

[dougandbugs]

This isnt the Oprah Winfrey show

It is Let's Make a Deal though, 5 bucks and I'm out the door.

 

[-bZ-AngrySalsa]

Dude. Do you even have a job? You were going to bed. I was done with this hours ago.

Pretty close to calling this one done and banning you from the community because you are just a moron and don't know when to call it quits.

 

[CR8Z]

I simply asked what is being done with the extra donation money, and somehow the people here have decided to troll and make it into a big thing....

You asked. We answered. You don't seem satisfied with the answer. I can't help you with that.

People like you come along all the time and it's the same old shit. You know better than everybody else. Good for you. Go do it better.

Since you're really good at math, try to figure some shit out. You rub people here the wrong way. They don't seem to like you. I'm sure you'll find people that do when you start your own club and spend all that money "the right way".

Good luck.

 

[CriscoCube]

Ah yea, threatening to ban people for asking some questions and calling you out for being toxic and lying to me... nothing highlights quality community or admins better.

 

[-bZ-AngrySalsa]

You are acting like an entitled little shit do you not recognize this?

 

[CriscoCube]

And you as an admin lying and trolling to people who want to improve the community would be....?

 

[-bZ-AngrySalsa]

Enough of this. You are clearly delusional/drunk/emotional or all three. Spent too long with you criticizing the way we do things here. If you have the memory space to recall we did this because there was issues with your home server on GMH. I am not going to dedicate anymore time to this, this is hilariously ridiculous. You can choose to play here, or just go. I am not going to sit here and listen to your jargon all fucking morning while you stay up skipping your McDonalds morning shift.

Your choice.

 

[-bZ-AngrySalsa]

Thread locked. Merry Christmas everyone!

 

[neonardo1]

I'll reply in a bit when I'm on the computer. Everyone chill out dang.

 

[neonardo1]

Here's part one with replies to comments made up through this post.

Scratch that I kept going through the rest of the thread too.

I am curious what the excess donation funds goes towards?

From https://banzore.com/forums/donate/:

Donations are used to pay for our servers for everyone's enjoyment. Any excess donations are saved for a rainy day (or month) to keep Banzore servers running strong.

By the servers costs just under $300 a month and banzore receives over $600 per month in donations.

Our BF4 server hosting bill alone is $432.23/mo for the 7 servers.

since there is plenty of money over the last months (nearly $2000 surplus in donations)

Your math is way wrong, but I do believe we have roughly that, maybe a bit more in total excess in our accounts right now. Billy holds some of the money and I hold some. This changed only recently given Billy's busy schedule in real life. This makes sure that if either of us get too busy, etc. the bills get paid, the servers keep running, and everything continues along as it should.

web-hosting costs about $5 per month

That's a huge generalization. A very simple shared web hosting account can be had for $5/mo yes. We do so much more than what a simple (crappy) shared hosting account can provide. We have an incredibly busy database that backs Procon, we run 7 instances of Procon which is a terribly coded program and thus very resource-inefficient, lots of custom stuff that you eluded to later and I'll cover more later, and more.

In actuality, "we" as Banzore pay nothing for web hosting and haven't since about 2016 when I started hosting the site. Hosting is what I do for a living so I provide us with hosting resources at no cost.

BF4 licensing costs $0.36 per slot

I believe it's $0.37 but yeah you've got the right idea.

the NFO server banzore is renting is their top-of-the line dedicate which costs $129.99 a month

Nope, the server we have is generally not listed on their site because it's never in stock. The cost for the hardware alone (incl. Windows licensing) is just under $300/mo.

Banzore has 416 slots so thats $149.76 in licensing for a total of $279.75 per month

RE: $432.23/mo from above.

(if for some reason the dedicated server doesnt have a simple SQL and Apache or whatever running on it?)

It doesn't work that way and that'd be horrible practice for so many reasons which I won't go into on much. We can't use the game server hardware for anything else anyway except what NFO's panel will let us manage through it, and that's due to the way BF4 licensing works. We're not allowed full access to the machine due to EA.

The admin tools are all free, procon is free, procon plugins are free

Yes, but the resources they consume are not free, technically, though as I mentioned earlier I provide that hosting for free.

When all 7 servers are full and popping our procon hosting consumes 7-10 CPU cores on average. That's 7-10 Xeon E5-2690 v4 (the CPU we currently use) CPU cores...that's a $2100 MSRP CPU before you take into account the rest of the hardware. Procon isn't too bad on RAM, usually sitting around 4GB total between the 7 BF4 servers.

IF we had to pay for the proper resources to run this it'd be somewhere in the neighborhood of $150/mo for that amount of guaranteed CPU power needed to keep things running smooth. I doubt you've noticed but our procon/adkats/etc. (in-game commands, etc.) run smoother than anything else's. That's because we have proper hardware backing it, and because I've spent countless hours tweaking it to run as well as possible.

Neo of course codes some of his own plugins and other things as well on his own time, technically no cost there unless were paying him?

I've never received/taken a cent from Banzore. Donations are sort of split between my PayPal account and Billy's and sit there until used for Banzore's bills.

Are there other hidden costs we don't know about?

Yes. Our actual operating costs are between $550-600/mo. when you take into account all of our expenses including some things that we only pay for yearly, etc.

If so I would love to hear more about this.

It's quite elaborate. The forum software we run (XenForo) cost money, the plugins we use for it cost money, seeding cost money, etc.

It would be cool if we could say have a 10-slot defuse server, or run some tournaments or otherwise. I'm not suggesting the money is being siphoned off or anything, just curious where that big chunk of money is going (or if its just being saved to spend in case donations get low in the future? but even so seems like way more than is needed for thatat this point) and if it wouldn't be possible to do something to build the community more with it.

I see no problem with this. 10-slots takes basically nothing to run and while we don't want a full-on 8th server (due to technical reasons), a small 10-slot rarely-used server wouldn't cause any issues and would cost us less than $5/mo.

Honestly, $2000 isn't a lot of money. That's less than 6 months worth of operating costs.

I couldn't agree with you more. We've been through plenty of "dry spells" in the past and the fact that we managed donations the way we do has always been the saving grace. To my knowledge we've never really had to beg for money to keep things going and @CR8Z has been around here longer than me (I'm circa 2016ish).

We set the donation goal slightly above our actual operating costs and then the excess that we generally have each month builds our buffer for hard times (or trying out servers for new games, etc.).

Also, for a website like this with minimal traffic $5 is on the HIGH end for cost of hosting. I've hosted plenty of websites and its cheap for low traffic sites like this. But lets say its $25 for some fucking reason (which there is zero chance it is, and if it is your being ripped off) thats still at least $300 a month extra to do something to build the community... that same community that is donating that money.

No, it's on the incredibly low end to the point that it wouldn't even work. I don't think you fully comprehend what all we have going on behind the scenes that I very briefly touched on above...but again, we (BZ) don't directly pay for this.

Also, I've been around most of the year and saw no event/tourny/give away, I'm curious to what event I missed?

Historically these were always done by direct outside donations as far as I'm aware with a few exceptions here and there - ie a member putting up a Steam game key for a giveaway and things like that. We've not had any recently.

Ah yes, why would I expect the community leaders, the ones with access to the servers to do anything with, and access to community fund to actually do anything with? Silly me.

BZ donations pay operating costs (ie server bills, software bills, etc.) and that's how it's always been as far as I know with few exceptions.

P.S. example hosting cost in below link is just $18 a year (which since you seem bad at math I'll do that for you, comes out to $1.50 a month), for a game-community website you don't need to be paying for certificates and all this other crap, php forums like this are free, i've run many, heres the link, you can also search google for a shit ton of other similarly cheap webhosting thaincludes sql databases: https://buyshared.net/shared-cpanel-hosting/ it includes SQL hosting which of course you would need for a forum and server states. If for some reaosn this site costs more, maybe there is some room for saving donation funds since it really doesn't need to cost more than $5 a month maximum. If for some reason you think it needs to cost more than that, I'd be happy to help you and show you how to set it up properly for much cheaper, I've done it MANY times over the last ~15 years for various communities i've run.

If I move our site to that it would cease to function and if it didn't, the owner of that company who happens to be a friend and competitor of mine would yell at me to get off for eating way too many resources. It couldn't run Procon or some of our other services at all given the lack of sufficient access to do it with shared hosting plans.

Again, I do this for a living. Not to be a dick, but you cannot do it better. Do you run servers for sites that get over 1.5 million UNIQUE visitors per HOUR? I do. Please do not patronize me.

I actually have about 1 report per 10 hours played in the server, so I def. play more than I report. All of my reports include video evidence, they are indisputable.

There's nothing wrong with your legitimate reports. I've been trying to break the stigma surrounding them. I do feel like you'd run into fewer issues if you didn't rub people the wrong way, which you do a lot of in-game and in the forums. I can't quite put my finger on why but I think it's the way you approach situations and are very critical of things/people/processes right out of the gate even when you don't have all of the facts. Even the original post in this thread reads as an attack instead of a question, though I know you meant it as a question. I see it for what it is, a question, but clearly others don't/didn't see it that way.

I hope this answers everyone's questions. Thread unlocked but please keep it civil...

 

[-bZ-AngrySalsa]

Thank you Neo!

@CriscoCube I do definitely owe you an apology.

As Neo mentioned, though you mean well, your mannerisms tend to get lost in translation and I did indeed feel you were insinuating misuse of our donation funds. I myself didn't have the correct information and that does not help things either. Just turned into us arguing and lashing out back and forth over essentially nothing.

I had no right to snap at you like I did, and in general I do enjoy you being a part of our community. \

Hopefully we can let that little spat last night be water under the bridge and continue gaming, which is what we all want to do anyway. I can't stand drama and I am sure you are not a fan either.

Thanks!

 

[dougandbugs]

@CriscoCube I do definitely owe you an apology.

I'm waiting on my apology too, it better be a good one.

 

[-bZ-AngrySalsa]

This isn't the Oprah Winfrey show.

 

[dougandbugs]

This isn't the Oprah Winfrey show.

Apology accepted, just don't let it happen again.

 

[UCAV_Pope]