Update 2003/02/27: We brought home the bacon! Thanks to everyone!

Update 2002/12/17: We are now collecting donations.

OK, obviously software optimization and tuning alone only bring as so far, but they're not enough to match the ever increasing load on antville.org. Let's put our programmer's pride aside for a moment and do something where it's easiest to do, and that is on the hardware side. And let's try to use our biggest asset we have here on antville, which is the loyality and support of our users.

Here's the math: We can have a server that has 3 times the processing power of adele, plenty of disk space and 1 Gig of RAM for approximately 3000 Euro (you'll have to reconfigure a bit to get to what we need). That would be more than enough to run antville.org, in fact it would give us a good safety cushion for the years to come. If 100 people would contribute to the purchase, that would mean they'd have to put out around 30 Euro each on average. I think we should be able to get this, especially for a one-time long term expense!

Organizing the collection of money will probably be the hardest thing to do, so I propose the following: Please think about whether you'd be willing to contribute to the purchase of a new antville server. If you are, please drop a short note to antville@helma.org and tell us how much you'd like to contribute. It may also be a good idea to get together in local groups of antville users and find out how much you'd like to contribute together. This way, we'll be able to to see if this whole plan works out or not after a week or two, and let everybody know if and how they should actually send us the money. We hope to have bank accounts in Austria and Germany as well as a Paypal account (we still have to check out how to withdraw Paypal funds to a german bank account, though).

Please don't feel obliged to contribute and only commit to giving what you are actually and easily willing/able to pay! Better only commit to 10 euro and then pay 20 than the other way round!

And please spread the word about this - the more people know about it, the higher our chance to succeed.

serious outage today morning. sorry in the name of the antville team.

i did not know how to help myself (or: antville and the antville users, resp.) but to restart the helma installation at adele.

however, the problem obviously was apache. so i restarted it, too. at the moment antville.org seems to be ok again, but i don't know how long it will remain that way.

apologies from my side, i am not up-to-date concerning the changes at the back-end. maybe somebody else can help more efficiently.