Patreon and useful updates?

I think you have a great idea with the website, and the patreon is also a good idea. I have donated myself a few times to the patreon, but have stopped because it seems like the sole purpose of the patreon is to just float hosting costs. How interested would you be in making useful updates to the website based on member suggestions? If this was the case I would be a lot more willing to donate more consistently to the site if I thought something was being done to improve the site rather than just maintain it's existence

I think there should be a bigger "reward" for people who contribute to their patreon. I like your idea but I think there should be more of a reward. Anyone could give a suggestion that isn't a patreon and something the suggestions given are nearly impossible to implement (Mike was talking about how group PM's will take a long time to do in general).

I think there should be a credits page (a page dedicated to Patreon supporters). Right now if you donate money, you get coins added your account. I think there should be more of a reward system for Patreon that distinguishes their support.

• Provide more interesting ways to spend credits, be it some decorations, just as you suggested, dedicated "supporters" website's areas (I believe Reddit has something like that) or maybe things like payment for votes, so that people can pay their credits to others to vote on the debates and therefore those people that get paid, can do the same for their debates and so on, so maybe it would make sense to have it as an internal currency, in a way. But also credits could be earned via on-site achievements and whatnot. But that's just a random idea, haven't thought properly about it. Anyway, I do realize that it needs to be properly designed.
  
• Redesign Patreon tiers and provide different bonuses depending on the tier.
  
• Check if Patreon provides a way to notify the server about the changes and have a dedicated credits page here, as you suggested. Or something of the kind. It all needs proper thinking. 

The website is still actively developed, just not exactly fast considering that I have a daily work and unfortunately have only a couple of free hours in the evenings. 

For example, in the last 2-3 months, I've fixed a bunch of glitches on the forum,  made it much better optimised for mobile users and made some changes to the way things work. After that, I worked on the auth system, same stuff here, mobile and design optimisations and the most important one was adding invisible Google 3 captcha, to make it harder on bots. Also not super exciting feature, but quite needed. Now I am working on the profile pages, which don't even have a mobile version at all. You can check the main profile page here and see a new design, which is not only mobile optimised and better looking, but will also allow users to upload "wallpapers" or "banners", whatever they are called.

When it comes to the group messages, believe me or not, I already have the code for that, but my idea was to first clean up the office space first: remove all those sections like "My debates" and "My forum topics" and "My questions" and move all of them to the profile pages, so all this info is in one place. And after I'd refactor the activities section, to make it much better and properly structured, I was planning to steal some ideas from GitHub, and of course the chat, make it mobile friendly and add group messages. 

So the bottom line is that it's still very actively developed and Patreon is there not only to cover the hosting costs, but also to see that all this effort is appreciated at least by a few people  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I understand the issue with not having enough time. If you don't have time, you don't have time not much more to it than that. The site is free and a personal project you chose to do of your own volition, which we are greatful. I think the idea of the patreon is great, I am more just curious if you had like higher tiers other than the 3 dollars a month one if that would incentivize maybe a deeper interest in putting more of your valuale time into some of these developments?

I am aware that you do put a lot of effort into fixng bugs. Some of those other features are pretty nifty as well, specifically having wallpapers and backgrounds, I always loved doing that on myspace back when it was big. 

It is good to know the code is ready for group messaging! That is one of the core features this website was missing in my opinion that DDO had. It will make mafia games much easier as well, and coordinating group events that don't neccesitate forums. Do you by chance have a tenative time line for the group messaging system being implemented or are you playing it by ear?

Coming from DDO where there was literally no effort put into development for several years, I can say I am very greatful for the time and effort. It's good to know that there are still developments being worked on and not being maintained. I hope this forum didn't come across as me being ungrateful for any of it. On the contrary I am trying to say I'd be willing to pay more money to reward such efforts as long as it seemed there was a significant effort being made into developments from the patreon costs. 

If to be honest, I didn't understand the question, could you please provide some example of what those tentative time lines are? I've never heard this term before.

But bluntly put, Patreon money will never be enough to hire an additional developer, for example. I could change the priorities of the features according to the donations, and most likely the extra money would go into advertising the site. 

Rephrase: Do you have a guess for when the group messaging will be complete?

Would you be open to accepting volunteers to help with the website and, if so, what kind of qualifications would they need?

I'm nowhere near qualified to do much of, well, anything when it comes to programming yet, but I'd love to help at a time in the future when I'm more capable.

Moving profile pics would be cool. 

This one is probably controversial, there's lots of people that are annoyed by such things :/