Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="BSF" data-source="post: 1194523" data-attributes="member: 13098">Admittedly, a lot of this is _really_ up to Morrus and whomever he chooses to include in decisions.  But, I want to throw out ideas and see if we can help put together a plan that Morrus can use as a starting point.  The community feel here is great and it just grew immensely for me.  I would like to be the crotchety old DM that a few years from now is relating stories to a new batch of players.  "Yeah, I remember back in '03 when we almost lost EN World.  Was scary, but all of us gamers got together and helped make sure our favorite online hangout was still there the next day.  So, you young'uns had better get in there and throw your donation in!"Anyway, on to my point...Would a bi-annual donation drive seem reasonable?  Not so often that it gets old and intrusive, but enough to plan a few times a year for.And you know what?  I am not sure I like calling it a donation.  It is more like an investment.  I invest in my game books.  I expect to read through them and use them more than once.  EN World is like that.  It is an investment in my hobby.  So, it isn't a fund raiser, it is an investment drive.  I believe we should set concrete goals.  We want to pay for x months of hosting.  We want to upgrade the server in x way.  We want to host the ENnies at Gen Con and we will use some of the funds for the awards.  That type of thing.  I think we should keep the donation time fun, not a chore.  Maybe plan specific group events around the same time?  Something that reminds us why we are a community and give us a chance to 'meet' the new people.  I think we should work to have a community 'Thank You' that everyone who contributes can have.   As I noted in an earlier post, I think a simple PDF loaded with gaming goodness would be great!  Most of us have NPC's, magic items, adventure locations and all sorts of idea seeds lying around.  If only a handful of us volunteered to flesh one or more of these out to contribute to the community gift, we would have a nice little resource.  Anyone that invests would be able to download the PDF.  It would then be our way, as a community, of saying 'Thank You' to the people investing in that community.  I have mentioned this twice and I would be happy to participate!  It would be my way of saying 'Thanks' to all the great people here and it might be enough to provide a little more incentive to somebody that might be sitting on the fence on whether they want to invest in the community. I think we should also encourage anyone that wants to offer giveaways to do so as well.  The above idea would be our way of making sure everyone gets something, even if they are already a Community Supporter.  The giveaways would be the way that various writers, artists and publishers could give back as well as drum up a little publicity and participate in the overall fun.  That being said, we should make the dates known well in advance.  Some of the publishers might want to adjust product release dates if it looks like it will coincide with an EN World investment drive.  I wouldn't really want any publisher to suffer in their first week of sales just because of the coincidence.All that being said, we need some sort of organization applied to all of our ideas.  Maybe some of them sound good, but are difficult to implement.  Maybe some are just bad ideas in general.  As has been mentioned, a business plan would be a good idea.  If somebody with more experience can help out here, and everything looks good to Morrus, I would like to do whatever I can to help out the community.  After yesterday, it really became clear to me how much this place, and these people, mean to me.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification