Update: We ordered our new server! For the time being, there's no more need for donations. If we have expenses in the future, we'll let you know and reactivate the fund. Thanks to everybody who contributed!

Here are the details for how to contribute to our fund for a better, faster Server for antville.org.

As of February 9 2003, we have received 3455,55 € in donations. Thanks to everyone!

You can send us money to our Paypal account using a credit card by clicking on the button below.

If you are located in Germany, Austria or Spain you may prefer to send your donation to one of our local bank accounts. Please be sure that you add the words "Antville Server Fund" as the reason for the transfer, as these accounts are not dedicated and it will make it easier for us to determine the amount of donations.

Deutschland Empfängerin: Ute Hennig Bank: Deutsche Bank BLZ: 380 707 24 Kto.-Nr.: 4632071

Österreich Empfänger: Hannes Wallnöfer Bank: BAWAG BLZ: 14000 Kto.-Nr: 01810085297

España robert gaggl caixa catalunya oficina: 0010 barcelona fontanella entitat: 2013 d.c 95 num 0202153234

We will update this page regularly to let you know what the current status of the funding is. Thanks to everybody who has agreed to contribute so far, and everybody who will contribute!

PS: Note that we are not targeting 3000 Euros flat as my previous posting made some people believe. Rather, that is a threshold I set up from which on we'd be able to get some serious hardware. 150 Euros more and we get a redundant power supply. 500 Euros more and we may get faster processors with more Cache. You get the picture. The more we get, the better antville will run in the future!

The problem that has been haunting antville.org over the last days has been found and fixed. It was caused by a bug in the image decoding functions in Helma 1.2. I'll be monitoring server performance for the next few hours. So far everything looks very good.

Note that this does not affect the fund for a new Antville server. We still need it, although (hopefully) not as badly as before! Right now we're still waiting for confirmation for our german bank account. We hope to have everything set up soon.

I checked the configuration / settings of my blog and couldn't find any changes. The ping at weblogs.com to inform about updates and new entries seems to be diabled currently. Just for your information ...

There was a short downtime during which I updated the code running on antville.org to the latest CVS snapshot. This might bring some relieve to our performance woes.

I also fixed a problem with non-ASCII characters (for instance ü, ö, ß etc) that was caused by the JDBC driver. Stories and comments posted earlier today that contain broken Umlauts must be edited to be fixed.

just right now that it seems we have crossed the 50% mark of the total sum we need for a new server i want to say a very more thank you to all of you who are willing to donate for this project. it's very nice and comfy here at the moment.

it looks like we soon can inform you about the details of how to transfer your money to bank accounts in austria and germany as well as eventually alternative ways (paypal or the like).

i added a little status bar to picture the current amount of money as announced via postings in the recent thread or e-mail. you can add the image to your weblog using the macro <% image name="project/donatestate" linkto="project.antville.orgstories/230784/" %> if you want to.

hopefully, i counted everything right which is not such an easy task because of double entries (ie. posting and e-mail) or messages that look like spam due to ambiguous subject lines.

so from now on, please announce your donations only via e-mail to antville@helma.org. further donations in the comment sections of any story will be ignored and won't be counted anymore.

read more about the antville server fund.

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.