Hello
This post is issued by Insejn, RTP (admin/moderators) and I (tech support).
We are launching an Indiegogo generosity campaign for Psynews: https://igg.me/at/D9j5urd2QHc
As you may know, Psynews has been completely free since it started 18 years ago: Hosting, Domain name, forum software, mainteanance, all paid by its creators and a few supporters (Manu / Psysurfeur, Fabien / Suntrip, the moderation team, a few kind sponsors (Daemon...)).
Back in 2006, following spam issues, the moderator team purchased a so-callled "perpetual" Invision Power Board license to replace the previous archaic board and everything went fine for years.
However, in 2016, as it introduced its v4, Invision services managed to get rid of those perpetual licenses! See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invision_Power_Board#Version_4.x.x
Outraged by this move, the moderators team decided not to upgrade to IPB v4. However, since April 1st 2017, the Psynews.org community is at risk as no more security patches are distributed for IPB v3.
The Psynews community is now calling upon your generosity to fund several years worth of Invision Board v4 licensing. We've been in contact with the Invision Support Team and here the deal we came up with:
In order to upgrade to version 4, you would need to have a standard license agreement. We can switch out your perpetual licence for a standard licence free of charge if you would like to upgrade to this release. This would then mean that there is no charge to convert your legacy license to a Standard License. Once that has been done, going forward, the cost would be $25 every 6 months to renew support, for ticket access and software updates.
Awesome! That means we would NOT have to pay the one-off $100+$100 for Core + IPB product (see https://invisioncommunity.com/buy/self-hosted), but ONLY for license renewal, $25 per semester.
What's included?
Ongoing access to new software versions, including major updates
Technical support for the entire renewal period
The IPS Spam Defender service, to protect your community against spam
Access to the IPS Marketplace for new themes and addons
Customer-only peer-to-peer support forums
The technical upgrade and maintenance will be performed by us, and will be, as usual, free of charge.
Furthermore, the psynews.org domain name is expiring by the end of september 2017. We'd also like your help to keep it going for a year or two. The price for a "dot org" domain is 15,50€/year (+21% VAT) with our registrar, Gandi.net, which is one of the cheapest.
See: https://v4.gandi.net/domain/price/detail/org/
The goal set here is for 3 years worth of renewals ($25 * 2 * 3 + 15.50€ * 1.21 * 3 ~ $220).
By then, Psynews.org will be 20 years old, and we can be proud it is amongst the very few sites that have been up for more than two thirds of the whole Intenet lifetime!
The Indiegogo campaign is available here: https://igg.me/at/D9j5urd2QHc
Please share!