Good morning, CGA community!
I'm posting a rare call for donations to purchase a license for the XenForo add-on Signup abuse detection and blocking. The add-on costs $45 USD for the first year and $30 USD per year after.
After extensive research, trial, and error trying to combat the deluge of spam registrations on our forums, I've finally resigned myself to increasing our annual expenses for the purpose of reducing the time involved managing our forums. (As an example to provide context, we received approximately 275 spam registrations in the span of 3 days--and that's with multiple preventative measures in place and after processing a moderation queue with approximately 50 entries.)
Based on customer reviews for the add-on, I have full confidence that the add-on will greatly reduce the number of spam registrations we receive, but if it does not, we will not renew the add-on license after the first year.
As posted on the Support the Christian Gamers Alliance thread, there are two methods to financially support the CGA:
Addendum:
And if you're wondering why I would increase our expenses for forums when the CGA Discord server is more active than our forums these days, please know that I did not make the decision lightly. (I don't think I ever make any decision that costs our community any amount of money lightly.
)
I'll also take the opportunity to remind everyone that we do not pay for our Discord server, which means that we do not own our Discord server, which means that we do not have full control of our Discord server.
As much as I appreciate Discord (it takes some of the best features of IRC and TeamSpeak and mashes them together with minimal administrative overhead), I'm reminded of the famous saying: "If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. You're the product being sold."
While I don't anticipate major changes to the Discord platform that would motivate us to move elsewhere, it's important to have a "home base" (these forums) in the event that things go sideways with Discord (whether due to a service outage, a major change to the Terms of Service, or other unforeseen complications).
I'm posting a rare call for donations to purchase a license for the XenForo add-on Signup abuse detection and blocking. The add-on costs $45 USD for the first year and $30 USD per year after.
After extensive research, trial, and error trying to combat the deluge of spam registrations on our forums, I've finally resigned myself to increasing our annual expenses for the purpose of reducing the time involved managing our forums. (As an example to provide context, we received approximately 275 spam registrations in the span of 3 days--and that's with multiple preventative measures in place and after processing a moderation queue with approximately 50 entries.)
Based on customer reviews for the add-on, I have full confidence that the add-on will greatly reduce the number of spam registrations we receive, but if it does not, we will not renew the add-on license after the first year.
As posted on the Support the Christian Gamers Alliance thread, there are two methods to financially support the CGA:
- Method #1: Please click here to set up a recurring donation to the Christian Gamers Alliance.
- Method #2: You can send a one-time donation via PayPal to donations AT cgalliance DOT org.
Addendum:
And if you're wondering why I would increase our expenses for forums when the CGA Discord server is more active than our forums these days, please know that I did not make the decision lightly. (I don't think I ever make any decision that costs our community any amount of money lightly.
)I'll also take the opportunity to remind everyone that we do not pay for our Discord server, which means that we do not own our Discord server, which means that we do not have full control of our Discord server.
As much as I appreciate Discord (it takes some of the best features of IRC and TeamSpeak and mashes them together with minimal administrative overhead), I'm reminded of the famous saying: "If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. You're the product being sold."
While I don't anticipate major changes to the Discord platform that would motivate us to move elsewhere, it's important to have a "home base" (these forums) in the event that things go sideways with Discord (whether due to a service outage, a major change to the Terms of Service, or other unforeseen complications).