ADA Depot - A Forum To Support Users of ADA Amplification Gear

Miscellaneous => Discussions => Topic started by: Dante on October 31, 2016, 01:05:41 PM

Title: Donations
Post by: Dante on October 31, 2016, 01:05:41 PM
Hello Everyone,

You may notice a new button in the header and the footer of the forum for donations via PayPal. I reluctantly had to add those buttons to cover ongoing costs of maintaining this forum. It's not a lot, but I have been paying for all hosting of the site and others have paid for domain registration etc. to keep this forum here for all of us to use.
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: Peter H. Boer on October 31, 2016, 11:46:12 PM
First donation done  :thumb-up: :thumb-up:
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: Systematic Chaos on November 01, 2016, 02:03:12 AM
me too
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: MarshallJMP on November 01, 2016, 04:39:47 AM
Me too! :thumb-up:
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: MikeB on November 01, 2016, 01:14:08 PM
Happy to contribute. I don't participate often, but then having rnolan on hand to answer a lot of my questions helps. However,  I do read the board each day and I love reading about what everyone else is up to. I also love the culture of this forum. Long may it last. Many thanks to all the good folks who dedicate so much time and effort to keeping it alive.
Mike
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: Dante on November 01, 2016, 02:10:35 PM
Thanks guys, I just had to come back here because I see 4-5 folks have already donated  :bow:

THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU

Every lil' bit helps, it won't take long to cover the hosting bill, and it isn't due right now.
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: Samuraipanda on November 01, 2016, 10:43:52 PM
Done!
 :banana-rock:
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: Rusty on November 23, 2016, 12:58:18 AM
Sent.
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: rADAr on November 23, 2016, 10:44:14 PM
Money sent today :)
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: Iperfungus on January 21, 2017, 03:32:59 PM
Hey guys, are you still collecting funds for The Depot?

Just let me know...I love this place...
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: rnolan on January 22, 2017, 05:17:01 AM
Hey Max, just click the donate button if you ever want to contribute financially.  :wave:
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: Dante on January 22, 2017, 07:41:28 AM
Hey guys, are you still collecting funds for The Depot?

Just let me know...I love this place...

FYI: As long as there is a hosting bill to be paid, I will be collecting donations for this place.

The last hosting bill was paid mostly by donations. I had to chip in the rest, but it wasn't nearly as bad as paying the whole thing myself. Then, just yesterday in fact, I received a lovely letter in the mail from Google stating that visitors will see an "unsecure site" message on Google when the search, because we're not on an HTTPS (secure) server. That costs more $$, about 2/3 of the hosting cost. Grrrr...

Any money donated just gets stored in a Paypal account I never touch, it's just for this Depot. If there is any surplus, or if we already have enough for the next bill, I'll just remove the Donate button altogether until the next one is due.

Once again, I would like to say a hearty THANK YOU to everyone involved in this place!!!
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: Iperfungus on January 22, 2017, 07:49:26 AM
Job done guys.

Dante, I think you don't need to explain or justify anything.
Everyone knows you here, everyone trust you and so do I.  :bow:

I'm learning to love this place and people who's around, making new friends and sharing some passion.
I'm more than happy to give something to make things go on!  :headbanger:
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: Dante on January 22, 2017, 10:48:09 AM
This is why I rebuilt this forum, best people on the web  :bow:
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: Iperfungus on January 22, 2017, 12:32:59 PM
This is why I rebuilt this forum, best people on the web  :bow:

The same reason why I subscribed!  :thumb-up:
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: rnolan on January 23, 2017, 02:58:41 AM
Well going HTTPS has some up sides, eg when you put in your password it wont be in clear text over the evilnet, but that's about it from our perspective, and I spose no other (nefarious) site can pretend to be us just by spoofing our site. @Dante, if we have to pay for it (and seems that's the direction), can you see/check if the hosting ISP can do Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 or later.  Secure Socket Layer (SSL) 3.0 or earlier is now totally insecure (but still better than nothing IMO), and TLS 1.0 & 1.1 are fast going the same way.  It's actually becoming common for HTTPS sites (and various browsers) to only support/accept TLS 1.2 for HTTPS connections.
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: Dante on January 23, 2017, 03:43:10 PM
If I understand the email correctly, it only applies when someone searches for ADA Depot via Google. If they know the url, we should be fine.  :dunno:
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: rnolan on January 24, 2017, 03:39:44 AM
It will also affect searches that turn up depot posts (where a post relates to what they were searching for), they'll probably either mark it as an unsafe site or not list it  :dunno: .  Some browsers (and some settings in browsers) will stop it working, and we can expect more of this over time.
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: Iperfungus on January 24, 2017, 04:53:29 AM
How much money is required and how much is missing yet?
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: Dante on January 24, 2017, 08:28:50 AM
How much money is required and how much is missing yet?

Our hosting bill is usually $107 per year, just paid it recently. The SSL certificates are $60-$80, depending on the hosting company. It's not a requirement yet, don't worry. As long as donations trickle in sporadically, we'll get there in time. Not a rush
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: Iperfungus on January 24, 2017, 08:56:47 AM
How much money is required and how much is missing yet?

Our hosting bill is usually $107 per year, just paid it recently. The SSL certificates are $60-$80, depending on the hosting company. It's not a requirement yet, don't worry. As long as donations trickle in sporadically, we'll get there in time. Not a rush

Ok, but let us know!  :thumb-up:
The Depot MUST LIVE ON!  :headbanger: :headbanger: :headbanger:
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: Dante on November 26, 2019, 08:09:35 AM
Hi Y'all  :waving-banana-smiley-emoticon

This topic of getting an SSL certificate for the site has come up again (to make the little lock icon appear in the browser address bar, showing that we have a secure site). I have no idea what it's gonna cost, but I'm going to look into it. I just paid the annual hosting bill ($107 = ~$9/mo., paid annually).

Donations are welcome and (always) appreciated.

Rock on  :banana-rock:
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: MarshallJMP on November 26, 2019, 09:26:36 AM
Done !
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: Rusty on November 26, 2019, 09:43:54 AM
Pay day for me next week,  consider it already in the post OK Dante.   :thumb-up:


SENT today
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: Peter H. Boer on November 26, 2019, 11:02:40 PM
Pay day somewhere this week.
I'll do yearly donation this weekend.  :headbanger:
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: rnolan on November 27, 2019, 12:32:40 AM
The main thing that TLS (similar to SSL) will provide is to protect log on details.  We'll need a certificate and probably some minor changes in the appache web server.  It needs to be at a minimum TLS v1.2 and better is TLS v1.3.  The last version of SSL (v3.0) is now very insecure and shouldn't be used.  Our server probably uses OpenSSL which is open source code for Linux (Unix) servers.  The latest version(s) of OpenSSL (IIRC 1.1.0) supports TLS v1.3.  This would also be a good time to rebuild the site and hopefully fix some of the bugs.
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: vansinn on November 27, 2019, 03:25:26 AM
Yeah, I wrote about the cert things to Dante yesterday; didn't feel like doing it in here..
As I wrote, we don't really need to pay for an approved cert, but could use a self-signed cert; I've made loads of those for private connections to mail- and web servers.
The negative with those is that users will get a warning about the certificate potentially being not trustworthy, which may not be good for us.
If we buy a cert, several places offers them cheaper than, say, Verisign.
The changes to the Apache server is mostly uncommenting the line about HTTPS, and adding a line about the cert.
Implementing this isn't related to rebuilding the site, but can be done with no other hassle.
(not that it may not be a good idea giving the site a preen'n'prune)
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: rnolan on November 28, 2019, 01:06:48 AM
Implementing this isn't related to rebuilding the site, but can be done with no other hassle.
(not that it may not be a good idea giving the site a preen'n'prune)
As I said it would be a good (opportune) time to rebuild the site, I know we (Dante and his/our ISP) can just implement HTTPS without a rebuild.  Moreover, I was agitating to go HTTPS a couple years ago  :facepalm: .  IIRC Dante said it would cost about $25 back then  :dunno: Mostly I want to get rid of the deprecated function error:8192: Function create_function() is deprecated
We get a couple of million of these errors in the logs per week...
But there are other issues (e.g. time format, intermittent email (for some of us), attachment size limit problem etc), hence time for a rebuild.
A self signed cert will cause issues with some browsers (e.g. chrome).  A cheaper one than verisign is fine as long as it's not from one of the dodgy cert offerings which prop up the hackers/miscreants etc.  Also need to configure apache to not down grade the connection to less than TLS 1.2
Title: Re: Donations
Post by: vansinn on November 29, 2019, 01:13:04 AM
^ agreed - some things I didn't think of (still feels weird not being admin anymore..)