Does anyone want to sponser the forum? Hosting is like 7$ / Month.
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I could do a part of that.
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I would chip in………….
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Count Windswept in
I doubt there needs to be anything changed for user level agreement to be acceptable for a corporate sponsorship.
Would be a lot better if other AWES companies and AWEurope and universities also joined.
We could sponsor a cleaner /fact checker
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Count me in!!!/cb
(Extra !!! To reach minimum number of characters 
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I had to write an extra bit too 
Since multiple people are willing to chip in - and to avoid that the evil venture capitalists of this world seize the opportunity to gain control and censor the forum: How about you set up a GoFundMe or something? I know it’s a bit “extra” for 84EUR p.a. - but trust me if I pay it alone - somebody will accuse me of “insider manipulation” or to “deceptively favor [my] investment interests by technical censorship”
PS: Full disclosure: I am not invested in any AWE company other than my own someAWE Labs S.L. - which as my wife would argue is against my own financial interest
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Yes crowd funding the forum could help? Might even get a few projects of the deck? there are multiple platforms you could use? But it is a numbers game? Subscribe star, patreon are few I’ve heard of. There are many more? Just depends how much exposure you want to have? If you believe that is manageable with out it falling back in on itself? Bigger it is the hard it falls? Im just wondering if to much complexity? Iff you really want to place the future of the forum under such pressures? It is common threat about how many companies collapsed relying on business to work? It could work? But it’s not with out risk and variables? The wider the base? the more risk you will have of something going wrong? Even at low numbers you will need the volume for it to work.
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That would be a good way. Or, one could set up a simple non-profit and a bank account to pay for the forum usage.
Though the lowest effort way here would be to just transfer by wire and trust @Lukas with this. At least i have no qualms about this. But it could be somewhat more of a thorny issue with company sponsors.
We should also consider that quite a lot of € has already been paid over the years the forum existed… So maybe if there are too many sponsors we could agree to offset some of that as well.
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Thank you all for the support! 
I’ve set up a donation campaign with donorbox:
https://donorbox.org/awes
In contrast to patreon there’s no VAT. There’s a fee of like 2.5% or so and payment processor fees. (Which are higher for patreon). Could someone try out each of the payment options?
We really don’t need a lot to keep the forum running.
I believe Windswept is now patreon or sole shareholder or something like that
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Thx, I couldn’t select any option other than monthly. I would have like once every 3 or 6 months, to limit transaction fees.
Also, on this forum on the admin dashboard there is this. Does that mean anything? How much would it cost to increase that? And are there other limits, say on the number of users?
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I set up a subscription. I could pay more if necessary
Thank you, @Windy_Skies , @tallakt , @Rodread, @batlabat !
The forum is sustainable funded now!
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What’s the subscription rate for making sure we can download distributed backup copies of the forum?
Here you can see that the backup previous to the current one was done on January 5th, if automatic backups aren’t already set up and are not visible here: https://forum.awesystems.info/admin/logs/staff_action_logs
A once a week automatic backup could be better, if things can go wrong which having a more recent backup could fix, and then automatic backup deletion of the older backups.
An admin would need to manually place a backup in a publicly accessible location I think to be able to download it. How are you then going to view it though? Create, download, and restore a backup of your Discourse database - admins - Discourse Meta
Edit: you don’t want that though as that would have all data, including user information and PMs for example. Maybe there are other export options.
Anyone can do this:
https://forum.awesystems.info/raw/1610
https://forum.awesystems.info/raw/1610?page=2
https://forum.awesystems.info/raw/1610?page=3
https://forum.awesystems.info/raw/1610?page=4
https://forum.awesystems.info/raw/1610?page=5
https://forum.awesystems.info/raw/1610?page=6
https://forum.awesystems.info/raw/1610?page=7
https://forum.awesystems.info/raw/1610?page=8
Or this: Slow Chat (prints the topic)
From: How to print or export very long topics - support - Discourse Meta
An admin could perhaps set up a custom query using this plugin: Discourse Data Explorer - plugin - Discourse Meta and then grant access to this query to a group of their choosing.
A simple suggestion is maybe anyone could ask me and I share the file on Dropbox or whatever. Though that would require the approval of @Lukas
The problem with this is that someone could use this to create a new forum competing with this one, but with an agenda that @Lukas or this community dont agree with.
With the backup and reading the manuals it should only takes minutes to spin up a new forum.
So maybe just a few select people should have these…