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Thread: Donate to PGD!

  1. #1
    Co-Founder / PGD Elder WILL's Avatar
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    Donate to PGD!

    Hey everyone,

    Things have really got quiet around here on the site and we are looking to help pick things up a bit. As you know PGD is a community site which is geared to helping pascal developers connect with other pascal developers so that you can all learn and share with each other. And we feel that we can do more to make that happen, but as you may or may not know, is that the entire staff is a volunteer-only group of independent developers just like you. All that you see here at PGD are the direct results of our spent time and money put into this site. And since 2004 there has been a lot of time, money blood and sweat that has gone into this place. Time has not always been our friend and well money we just don't usually have. We want to continue to do what we do, but we want to also do better than what we have. This is where you, the community, comes in.

    We would be very much appreciated to anyone that can spare whatever they can to help us in some of our goals. These are things that will help us make this place better, easier to maintain (time and financial wise) and more fun. Emphasis on the more fun! Because thats why we work with Pascal and come here in the first place.

    Some of the things that can be done with your contributions:

    - Nicer site experience. Purchase of site software such as vBulletin so that everyone can post news and articles in a nice and easy manner without the hassle of extra logins and configurations and mismatched free site software.

    - Help pay for hosting. Dom, bless his heart, has been flipping the bill for ages for the pascalgamedevelopment.com domain and it's web space. And as much as he doesn't mind doing it, wouldn't it be nice to help cover some of this as a community?

    - Advertise the site and the community outside of PGD. This will help bring in others that don't know about how great Pascal is and what we are all doing. Imagine all those that have not been initiated. This helps bring in new blood to the community and make events like the PGD Annual more exciting with more renewed participation. We also get to show all those C weenies just how much better our language really is.

    - Help purchase better competition prizes for PGD Annual and other events. You know we have had some great sponsors in past years for our competitions, but wouldn't you really rather win a sound or graphics card instead? Or many other options and cool things we could do if PGD had the cash to fund future competition events themselves.

    These are some of the awesome things we could do for this community if you and your other hundreds of PGD members just gave what they could to chip in. I've created this Donation button below for you to click on and enter whatever amount you feel you want to or can give. It's totally up to you! We would like to see this community continue grow so please help out and give what you can. Thanks.
    Jason McMillen
    Pascal Game Development
    Co-Founder





  2. #2

    Re: Donate to PGD!

    - Help purchase better competition prizes for PGD Annual and other events. You know we have had some great sponsors in past years for our competitions, but wouldn't you really rather win a sound or graphics card instead? Or many other options and cool things we could do if PGD had the cash to fund future competition events themselves.
    I don't think this is really neccesary. I just recieved the books I won and I'm very happy with them. I've got approx 1000$ worth of prizes if i'm not mistaking, which I think is alot.

    What we need is more people to join the competitions. Last competition was a bit dissappointing because there were very few competitors (this wasn't caused by lack of "good" prizes, I'm quite sure of that). It's all about showing your progress and commenting on progress of others. That's what makes PGD a great place to be.

    I think that advertizing is the way to go here. More interesting content, like games, tutorials, the PascalGamer magazine will also attract programmers.

    Unfortunately most new programmers are drawn towards C# and XNA, I-phone development or other fancy game-engines that have nothing to do with pascal. That's probably because those communities are bigger which means: more tutorials, more tools, more people who can help etc...
    Coders rule nr 1: Face ur bugz.. dont cage them with code, kill'em with ur cursor.

  3. #3

    Re: Donate to PGD!

    I've 5$ CAD donated now

  4. #4

    Re: Donate to PGD!

    My donation is in too ($20CAD).

    Provide me with a standard 460x60 banner for PGD and I will get in the banner rotation on my site.
    Jarrod Davis
    Technical Director @ Piradyne Games

  5. #5
    Co-Founder / PGD Elder WILL's Avatar
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    Re: Donate to PGD!

    Quote Originally Posted by chronozphere
    Unfortunately most new programmers are drawn towards C# and XNA, I-phone development or other fancy game-engines that have nothing to do with pascal. That's probably because those communities are bigger which means: more tutorials, more tools, more people who can help etc...
    FPC can do iPhone development. A long running member of PGD offered to do an article for a future issue of Pascal Gamer Magazine on it.

    Thank you JSoftware, Glenn Linde, Benjamin Rosseaux and Jarrod Davis!
    Jason McMillen
    Pascal Game Development
    Co-Founder





  6. #6
    PGD Community Manager AthenaOfDelphi's Avatar
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    Re: Donate to PGD!

    Quote Originally Posted by deathshadow
    You WASTE MONEY on vBull you can pretty much guarantee it will DECREASE how often I come here - have you SEEN the TRAIN WRECK of bloated bull version 4 is saddled with? Lands sake the damned forum index of maybe 3k of text content is a megabyte download! Between the endless AJAX for nothing, abuse of ordered lists on obviously tabular data, nonsensical heading orders and obvious content cloaking effectively shooting oneself in the foot so far as SEO is concerned - They've got giant brass balls charging money for that ****.
    If you want to be taken seriously when presenting "rational analyses" like this I would suggest you don't shout as much, focus more on the facts of the situation and lose your obvious sense of superiority when it comes to matters of web development. With all due respect, you are not some all seeing all knowing god of web development, despite what you may think!

    We (the admins) have discussed our choice of forums extensively, and we have access to a full vB4 installation (I'm currently porting my own forums to vB4 so I've given WILL, Traveler and Savage access) so we can get a feel of what it's like and what it can do, and well... WILL and I like it because we can see the potential for it to free the admin team from having to look after the mechanics of the site so much (we won't have to worry about integrating bits and pieces which ultimately lead to a site that is prone to security problems because it's such a pain to update) and get back to what we like best... making content and other fun stuff for the community.

    If we upgrade and you don't visit simply because we're using vB4, then really, thats a little childish and the only real loser in that situation will be you and if you really think it's a bad choice, present us with reasoned arguments and we'll listen... not this kind of aggressive put-down crap that you seem to like posting.

    On the subject of the facts of the situation... I'd like to know which forum you visited where the index page is a megabyte download... my plain vanilla out of the box install with my forums on is significantly, read hundreds of kilobytes, less than a megabyte, so I've not noticed any problems with page size, and I have to say... I've never noticed any problems with page size (even when I was running a beta of my game and the forums for the game down a 56K modem).
    :: AthenaOfDelphi :: My Blog :: My Software ::

  7. #7

    Re: Donate to PGD!

    it will DECREASE how often I come here
    - deathshadow

    maybe that won't be such a bad thing...

    Wake up from the dream and live your life to the full

  8. #8

    Re: Donate to PGD!

    Quote Originally Posted by Wizard
    maybe that won't be such a bad thing...
    That comment doesn't help anybody. Please don't post things just to piss someone off.

    it will DECREASE how often I come here
    It's all pretty simple:

    You should come here if you like programming games with Pascal, and not because we have a fancy customized or whatever... kind of CMS. I respect your oppinion about software, but that statement doesn't make sense at all.
    Coders rule nr 1: Face ur bugz.. dont cage them with code, kill'em with ur cursor.

  9. #9

    Re: Donate to PGD!

    I never actually knew much or looked into forum softwares before but this thread made me to. Google came up with some reviews and they give an overall impression. Sorry to say most user comments talk about same things deathshadow mentioned.

    vBulletin3.8 user rating 5/10 of 83 votes.
    vBulletin4 user rating 3/10 of 37 reviewers.

    You can look up at:
    http://www.forum-software.org/vbulletin/user-opinion
    http://www.iterating.com/component/c...7501-vbulletin

    This just for quick Googling I'm not saying you should change or something because of this, just stating the facts. It may be big, slow, bloated resource hog but it's used by alot of people.

  10. #10
    PGD Community Manager AthenaOfDelphi's Avatar
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    Re: Donate to PGD!

    I haven't had enough time to analyse the situation as deeply as you clearly have what with work, my own projects and my degree work, so all I can say is that my experiences don't mirror yours.

    If your only argument is bloaty, badly written HTML etc. then I really don't think that is a sufficient no-no to avoid vBulletin. When I revisit the forum homepage at vbulletin.com, I get hit with a 20k download (at 56Kbps thats about 3 seconds, so if your 22Mbps connection is taking 30 seconds to load that, then there is something seriously wrong with your connection, your ISP has really bad peering arrangements, or you're on some seriously high contention service... regardless, on my 8Mbps service the page loads in under 4 seconds and a large portion of that is courtesy of facebook and google). It's never going to be as neat and tidy as hand optimised HTML granted, but if it's the choice between vBulletin with all the features we want to provide in one easy to maintain platform and some open source product which requires a bunch of plugins/modules to do what we want and so becomes a nightmare to maintain, then I would go for vBulletin EVERY time.

    Some people don't like vBulletin... I wasn't keen until I used it and ran a site on it. In my experience, it just runs. In 8 years of running a vB board, I have NEVER experienced any problems like we have experienced here from time to time (and we've used SMF and phpBB). From an admins perspective, thats a very appealing direction to go in.
    :: AthenaOfDelphi :: My Blog :: My Software ::

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