rdrama.net, we need to talk

Hi, good morning. Did you sleep well? You look really cute today. Smell real pretty, too. I made you some breakfast, it's your favorite! Sit down and let's chat

The site has been chugging around peak time the past few days. Like when LLM brought that girl from Reddit who got pumped and dumped yesterday? Place was borderline unusable for hours. We're growing. And fast. Which is great! You're doing SO well and look how big you're getting omg

But with this increased size and activity comes increased hosting costs if we want to remain usable. The shitty 18 million years to load a page when something is popping off midday is really not cute. And we've gotten lots of asks about whether or not we're taking donations or have a Patreon or anything from people who saw this coming and want to keep it going.

And so rather than continue to 100% foot the bill out of pocket, we're going to allow for that to happen. There won't be downtime if you don't pay, there will be no features locked behind donations, nothing like that. We just want to get a payment structure in place so we can grow the place further and maybe get closer to doing it for free, rather than paying an increasing amount to do it for free.

Which brings us to the point of this post -

How would you like to do this?

The big three would be:

1. Patreon - Everyone knows Patreon, it doesn't need an explanation. The downside to Patreon is that we'd likely get booted at some point because we serve content and beliefs that are sometimes considered unfashionable.

2. Gumroad - This is my personal recommendation. It's like Patreon, but with less reprehensible business practices and they don't ban you for getting your pronouns mixed up. Sam Hyde has been on Gumroad for years without issue. It's a reliable service. The only downside I see here is that you're all a bunch of schizos and may not trust the platform because it's not well-known.

3. Paypal - Yuck, Paypal. But Paypal is reliable enough. They allow for recurring monthly donations. They just charge us a premium. Which is fine, just not optimal. The downside here is that - again - many of you are mentally ill and don't trust trustworthy services like this, and PayPal is typically tied to people's real names. This isn't accessible through our site; only on PayPal's end. And PayPal is super secure. But schizophrenia, I know.

We'll still allow for individual crypto donations (I don't even know what crypto is besides pretend computer money, but Aevann has something set up??) or whatever, but ideally we'd like to get a recurring structure in place to keep the site running smoothly and scaling with our growth without hiccups.

We will never serve you ads.

This is annoying, not secure, and puts us at the mercy of our advertisers and inevitably makes rdrama beholden to advertiser whims. Don't suggest it.

So, which of the three options would you prefer? If you won't donate like $1 or $5 a month, that's totally cool and I get it. This isn't a pressure post. This is just to gauge the best path forward for those that do want to.

There will be cosmetic rewards. Snazzy profile badges and a slick glittery gold effect for your name. Maybe I'll go down on you if you're in the area. Maybe I'll even let you reciprocate

I'll pin the three main options as comments in this thread, upvote the one(s) you like, downvote the one(s) you don't. Feel free to suggest others in top-level comments, or ridicule any/all of them, or delete your account in a rage.

I love you.