It's been quite a while since we last asked for donations to cover the bills, but our funds have run dry again. Due to time constraints, this donation drive has to be a little different from previous drives we've had. The main difference is that each donation must be at least $100. Why such a large minimum? Well, there are two reasons, but the underlying cause is that the donations during this drive have to go directly to our hosting company. The first reason for the large minimum is that they do not like to process small payments because processing payments costs them time and money. Not to mention potential headaches involving reversed payments and other tomfoolery. The second reason is that we really do not want the host to flag our account or to cut off our service. Accepting small payments, especially from widely disparate sources, could cause our account to be flagged or other trouble for us. Since we would like to continue operating and do not want to be on bad terms with our host, the large minimum is necessary.
Therefore, if you are willing and able to make a payment through PayPal that is at least the $100 minimum, please send a PM to gfk to receive instructions on how to make the payment so it is credited to our account. Please only ask for the payment instructions if you are serious about making a donation, since we do not want to widely circulate the details.
If you would like to donate but cannot afford the $100 minimum, you could consider pooling your money with other like-minded ADC members and then have one member of the group send a single large payment to our host. For those who are friends with other members of our community, this may be a way to contribute to the donation drive. Make sure that you know the person who will be forwarding the money and trust them because we have no control over what they do with your money.
Assuming this drive is successful, we will hopefully be able to set up a more traditional donation drive in the next month or two where we are able to accept smaller payments so the barrier to donate is lower. We will post more about it when the time comes and we have everything squared away and ready to go.
Inbox speed up
On a lighter note, those of you out there with a hefty inbox may have noticed that it had begun loading slower and slower in recent weeks. We have made some changes behind-the-scenes that should make inboxes and sentboxes load much more quickly, especially for those folks who have hundreds or thousands of PMs. Occasional slowdowns may still occur during periods of heavy activity, but performance overall seems to be much better thus far.