I think it's fine to solicit donations. I think it's also fine to give priority treatment in terms of support to people who've donated.

Expanding on that, I don't think it's fine to say something is free when it's not. :)

I'm not sure how that follows from my comment on donations, but nonetheless I still don't get what all the fuss is about. If I tell you that there is no monthly cost, but there is a setup fee, then I think I'm quite justified in saying that my hosting is free modulo the setup fee: it costs you nothing to keep your MUD on my host. (Note the difference between 'keep' and 'put'.) There's no deceptive practice, in any case. I'm not sure how better to describe it than "free with a setup fee". The monthly cost is after all zero. Regardless, as there is no deception, I'm not sure where all this angst is coming from.

*shrug* I'm still rather amazed that this has managed to garner three pages here, I really thought it was fairly well covered in just the first page. By somewhere about halfway through the second page we started rehashing for newcomers.

'no subscription fee'

Isn't that the same as saying that the subscription is free? :wink:

Right. It's not like the setup cost is hidden. But still. In order to get hosted, you have to pay a fee. Even if it isn't periodical, I still don't consider that free.

Lets say I am giving out free computers, you just have to pay for shipping and handling.. The computer's still free, even if I am making you pay for shipping fees.. Isn't this almost the same thing?

Sure, in order to get the free computer, you have to pay for a handling and shipping fee. The computer is still free though.

No, it's not the same thing. Shipping actually does cost money. Creating a new user on linux doesn't cost anything.

I beg to differ. Setting up the account doesn't cost anything monetarily, however it does cost time. And as some people are fond of saying, time is money.

I don't know why you guys are arguing this to death. A $5 setup charge with free hosting is nothing.


I did this. I paid $80 for a free 21" CRT monitor. The cost was, of course, for just the shipping. That thing was HEAVY.

Time can be considered money, but shipping something takes time AND money. Again, I feel they aren't the same.

$5 setup charge is infinitely more compared to no setup charge.

Right now you're wasting my money for posting about this yet again and for causing me to spend money replying to said post. :rolleyes: I think you owe me some time. :tongue:

Seriously Zeno, there's a reason why people get paid to do this kind of stuff for their job. It's why I pay Samson to host my MUD. I don't care about the server itself, physically – geez, I can do that myself. What I care about is having somebody I consider competent managing the servers in case something happens (like setting up backup power supplies etc.), and taking care of a technical problem if something happens so that I don't have to worry about it myself. (E.g. a network problem.) So I'm very surprised that you so casually dismiss the value of the time spent by somebody to set up an account, create the quotas, get things started, etc.

Speaking of all that, David.. http://www.binarygoblins.com:8088/ is returning:

But paying a setup fee doesn't mean you'll get that support. All it means is you get a user. That could easily mean you'll never hear from an admin again if you need support.

Thanks Conner, I hereby consider myself contacted. :tongue: I'll look into it and see what's going on. Thanks for letting me know.

Zeno: yes, that's very true, and in fact one reason why I wouldn't necessarily want free hosting, but I have the luxury of being able to make that choice. Nonetheless, I was simply pointing out why it's not too unreasonable to expect some degree of compensation for the initial set up. And seriously, $5 is about the price of popcorn at the movie theater. (Or ~two coffees from Starbucks. You get the idea.)

lol I don't have a problem with the amount. I thought we were still discussing the topic of "free hosting" not really free if it has a setup fee. That's what I was going on about. :P

Sorry about that, I really meant to contact you about it a day or two ago when it first started showing that but I've been busy with Dragona's doctor appointments this week and usually I'd have PM'd you at the FUSS forums.. but this reminded me of it.. and those emails to webmaster@localhost just never seem to work right for me. :wink: :lol:

Man, you can still find popcorn at the movies for $5 these days?? Our local theatre cheats us to no limits.. *sigh* :sad:

No problem at all Conner, better a few days after you notice it than never. But I still think you should have emailed webmaster@localhost: if he's willing to do the work of fixing it, hey, I'm all for that. :lol:

And yeah… popcorn is like $4 for the small size at our theater, $5 for medium I think. Darn tickets are like $9.25, and that's WITH the student discount. You know, it's not often that the French beat the US in terms of capitalism, but it's fairly common to have these subscription-type plans where you pay like $20 a month and get to go to as many shows as you want. I was somewhat stunned when I saw that theaters here don't have that. (Instead, they have these point plan thingies, where every ticket gives you bonus points that apply toward free popcorn every once in a while or things like that.) It was also amusing because there was some criticism of the plan (in France) because people were saying it was too Americanistic in its capitalism, and would kill small theatres, etc. Therefore it was quite amusing to me to see that, in fact, Americans don't have it. :lol: (At least, not the theater chains I've seen: the AMC and Century theatres.)

Fixed the repository; the problem was a bzr update that caused the web-serve plugin to break. (d'oh) Except that now, all changes were 37 years ago. :smile: