Right, Styxx, Setekh, etc.: Sorry about the new thread, but the old one's half spam and nobody seemed to have a clear idea of what was going on, anyway. Hopefully starting fresh will clear the air. Also, if any spam (i.e. people making crap posts based on their personal opinions about our chances of raising enough money, whether it's even worth it, etc.) appears in here, could one of y'all delete it? It really kills any productivity when half the people in a discussion are just flapping their lips and not doing anything.
Now. This is getting kinda annoying. There's a few very fundamental steps that need to be taken in order to set up this fundraiser to buy the Freespace license, after which everyone could freely discuss it all they like, but as of now none of that's gotten anywhere. So. I will reiterate what needs to be done- it's all pretty basic, at least once we get past the stage of who's-doing-what, and everyone needs to figure out that part of it and start doing it. Really, the amount of good an attempt to raise cash for the license is gonna do drops exponentially after the end of this weekend, since outsiders will lose interest, someone else will buy the license before we even get a chance to get if off the ground, etc.
To reiterate:
I've already offered to help fill out the forms. I'm not the best person to do it, but I'll give it a shot. I was too exhausted last night to start it properly, so yeah, this is still at zero, but in all honestly I'm kinda shocked that nobody else offered to help or anything. If someone else offers in the next couple hours, they are totally welcome to head that job. It's mostly a buncha boring form-filling, y'all have done taxes before. That's step one almost outta the way, albeit probably the least critical one- we could get by without any charity status whatsoever, it just makes it more appealing to the large bidders. Link will be posted in a minute.
Now, someone needs to set up somewhere to put this money, and a way everyone with a credit/debit card/paypal account can get to it. It's gotta be absolutely secure and trustworthy, else nobody, especially not I, will send any money to it. There should be a mechanism to relatively painlessly return funds to those who donated them should the effort fail. While it's possible that just setting up an online bank account and letting Steak have exclusive withdrawal access would do the job, ideally no single person should be able to, say, siphon off funds- even if we know they wouldn't do that, there's lots of people who don't, and the attempt to raise enough cash will founder on them. Do NOT just post if you've got an online bank account- like I said, this needs to be something a bit more reputable than the infamous boob-job thing. Setekh has already, unless I'm mistaken, volunteered to man this in another thread (and feel free to correct me if I got the wrong impression), everything will default to him if there is not an easy way to set up an independent account.
Someone needs to set up a webpage with a submission interface for it- simple as humanly possible, designed like a standard Web order form so nobody'll get confused, needs fields for the relevant amount/pay type/info stuff, name, whether they want the donation to be anonymous, **** like that. Needs to send the money to the account and the other stuff to a single reasonably protected database, 'cause we'll probably need it. Someone with, y'know, PHP experience, which'd probably mean Styxx if he's willing.
Someone else needs to give the page all those nice things like 'special thanks' listings and regular insults and Derek flames to get the hate crowd (by far the largest interested group) going. This could really be anyone who's remotely personable and has at least the IQ of a concussed squirrel, which most likely means someone like aldo or Shrike or Thunder or whoever- if nobody is interested (which I doubt) I'll do it on a weekly basis unless I get shipped out to Morocco or wherever this year, but ideally someone else should. I'll check with an0n to see if all this **** can get hosted on a Nodewars page, he's probably got more capability to deal with a large influx than anybody else.
Once we've got that settled, and the account is working and getting its inital donations, then everyone can settle back and worry about all this other stuff, like negotiations with Interplay and all- it'll be a while before there's a need to act again on that front. But first things ****ing first. Until then, any other talk on the subject will probably strictly counterproductive. That means you too, Stealth. Agreements? Disagreements? False statements about penis size or potential donation amount? Other thread.
