Save DART from shutting down; Join the fight to keep or community alive

Dear DART community,

As you all know, DART has been a place for passionate and engaging debates for years. It is a platform where people come together to share their thoughts, challenge one another, and foster a community of thinkers and doers.

However, today I have some troubling news to share with you all. The site owner, Mike, has informed me that DART is at risk of shutting down due to lack of funds. Mike has been putting in more money than he is making, and has now been laid off from his job, making it nearly impossible for him to continue to sustain the site on his own.

But there is hope. We can save DART by rallying together and showing our support. We can use the  Patreon link at the bottom of the page to give donations, and I urge each and every one of you to consider contributing what you can. Even a small donation can make a big difference and help us keep this wonderful community alive.

DART is more than just a platform for debate. It's a space where people from all walks of life can come together to learn from one another, to grow, and to make meaningful connections. Let's not let this incredible resource disappear. Let's show our support and keep DART alive for generations to come.

Thank you for your consideration, and for being a part of the DART community.

Sincerely,

PREZ-HILTON 

President of DART

P.S. I am working on getting some Patreon subscriber benefits in order to help both Mike and Patreon supporters. 

Entropy endeavors ending enigmatic equations.

Debateart deliberates denial determining decisive distinguishing decay

Forfeit finances, fatality fluctuates freedom for fluent forums.

GG.

Announcement ascertained by asinine asshole affirms atrophic animal analysis.

I am not even sure if that was english

Thanks for working on what was my suggestion since 2018.

An*

I’ve been (the only) patreon supporter of Dart for the last 2 years. I’m going to see if I can up my subscription amount for the next couple of months

I have gave off and on but I set up a recurring membership yesterday. It's not much but I have to wait a couple of pay cycles to up it, and I also owe him a couple of larger one time payments I will hopefully be getting to him soon aside from the recurring ones. I think RM and Mikal have both also have sporadically as well

do you think it'd be beneficial to let people know how much the expenses are? that might, or might not, help people raise their contribution. i know another website and forum only costs 800 dollars a year, though of course that's a lot to someone who is struggling. 

This is about 55 a month for server costs and doesn't include time. I think you can click on the Patreon link at the bottom of the page and it will tell you how close he is to meeting that goal. Ideally he gets $100 a month so he can "safely" cover other expenses behind server costs

I'll consider supporting.

That said, how much do you think individually would be a good amount? 

$3 is what the suggested amount is. Do what you feel like. No pressure 

Give me a few months, and I will probably subscribe

So to maintain this website properly, I have to pay for a few services, including:

1) Decent virtual private server with a backup service enabled
2) Service for sending emails
3) Service for storing avatars and other files
4) Monitoring service
5) Service for optimizing website's performance and protecting against bot attacks

Further down the road I will also have to pay for a decent logging storage service and also put some money into ads to attract some new people.

I try to save where I can, but it's not always possible, if we do the things the proper way.

That being said, I want to thank you folks for your support and say that I really appreciate it. You are the best community :)

Sure, although I don't use it too often. My handle there is @JustMichael#5716

Can you please elaborate? What do you mean profile pictures not loading? 

Sent a friend request 

Hate to say it, but if all else fails, you could place an ad at the top and bottom of every page. I'd be willing to turn off my adblocker for this site. Just don't go crazy with the ads per page like DDO did.

First thing I see after months being away. I again have the eerie feeling that the civilization I live in is slowly reenacting the rat utopia experiment.

Direct support is the way to go, ads don't make enough with so little traffic (assumed). Do a poll, see how many people are willing to pay anything, divide $1000/year by that number.

I have often said of commentator subscriptions that they're too damn high, and not as in a "It would be better for me if that was cheaper" I mean the price is set at the wrong place on the supply demand curve.

Do you see Disney charging $15/month? No. They provide way more entertainment than any commentator or website (for the average person)

It's #Subscribers * Subscription amount that matters, if people charged like $1/month they would make more because then people could support their top 5 favorite "causes" where as at $15/month they might not even be able to justify supporting one.

So the above suggested $3 is orders of magnitude more likely to get people to sign up and stay signed up.

"The Secret of NIMH"?

No that was in the mid 1300s, this one was recent :)

Hm, I don't think Patreon takes prepaid vis gift credit cards.

They also don't accept maps to treasure you went back in time to bury.

Welcome to the future: https://nowpayments.io/blog/subscriptions-with-cryptocurrency *May not be here yet, but lacking a functioning product never stopped IBM from advertising did it?*

Agh,

I hate having a billion accounts and passwords for c**p,

I like prepaid cards, because unlike by bank card, websites can't just keep charging it and saying oops.

I don't need my name attached to payments, of course I'm not doing anything bad, or being watched by anyone important, but I like privacy of prepaid card.

I don't like credit cards, what a scam, withdraw money one doesn't have? Why not just save up your money? (Yes, not everyone can do such).

I like using cash.

If I understood/found easy, online money and such,

I'd be trying to play the stock market all day long.

I set up a Patreon account years ago gving $3/month but never received that "shiny frame" recognition that was supposed to be our reward for contributing.  I let it run until we decided to have presidents and Supadudz became a moderator- which just felt like the beginning of the end to me.  As with everything else on this site...promises made, promises neglected.

It used to be I could take pride in being number one on the leaderboard for this site but that hasn't really been true for a long time now.  It should seem like an impressive feat but when people log on to the front page of this site these days, all they see is white boys expressing their  irrational  hatreds and overgeneralizations and mostly outright lies about minority groups.  People see that and say, "well of course you're top debater--  this is just a crowd of uneducated assholes."  Increasingly, it becomes impossible to disagree or to take any pride in my past accomplishments here.  Certainly, it is difficult to give actual money to a site in steep moral decline and that I'm not sure I even want to be associated with.

I know of a genuine reasoning behind the concept of what a credit card is (many colloquially say 'enter your credit card details' and include debit card in what you can enter so I am clarifying we specificlaly so mean credit here, not debit). In essence, when you have a 'debit' card it is actually from a bank's perspective the same as a 'credit' card, the reason is that what you are spending is cash in the future after the payment is a pledge/promise you will give it via the bank transfer to come.

The bank only earns anything aside from shareholders in it but the stocks in banks are actually one of the tiniest to bother with in terms of what you even are allowed to own (they run the fucking system, they are not letting you play your stocks and shares and get too rich or complain too much, especially not after that recession). Instead, banks often have the CEO as a self-sustaining beast, a majority shareholder in itself that buys his/her/their way to power.

The banking system runs on actual corruption as a way of life, not in a deceptive sense but a literal, open one. The mark of the best bank is the one lending out loans the most that get paid back on with the most netted profit via interest. That is the bread and butter of banking and the problem is how do you achieve that since if you charge too much interest they will go elsewhere for the loan? You get riskier and lend out loans more leniently, hence the recession that happened when not enough paid the banks back and the bankers had been spending millions of theoretical credit that they assumed would equal itself out over time.

The credit score concept was to let there be something, literally just one thing, beyond loans and sucking people in with them, that more honestly and seriously ended up with people paying the bank back with a tiny bit of interest due to trusting them based on their credit score. It was in essence a loan you are paid to spend money however you please for a month (or group of months whatever the agreement is for your credit card), then you may not even pay it all back in time, just part of it so they add on some interest and trust the money's coming in. It was like the loans system except with pure greed being the actual motive on both the consumer and the bank's end. It was a fair agreement of 'pay us based on how much we can trust you reward those that fuel your greed'.

There's sense in what you say,

'Really fixed into our societies though,

Lot and easier for businesses to pay electronically to some bank it seems,

And bank 'is a vault, that barring it going under,

Is more secure than my house,

And if thieves don't believe everyone has a vault in their house, prevents break in numbers, perhaps.

. . .

I suppose some of my perspective comes from seeing how 'many credit cards some people would have,

Inventorying people's belongings, with another person.

Always played a correlation in my head,

Credit cards implying a person doesn't know how to handle their finances, show control,

Not 'true of course,

But correlations play, as correlations play.

. . .

If I go by this site,

I suppose physical 'money, is a form of credit as well,

And I imagine 'one reason for credit cards, is convenience of 'one rectangle, than one-hundred in one's wallet.