I've brought this up through other media and in the chatroom this week but figured it was worth putting in blog form:

When I first started this community in April of 2009, my life was much different. Samantha (SavantInamorata) and I were married just a few years, had recently moved to a new place where we knew no one, and had a newborn baby who just kind of laid there. There was considerable time to dedicate to building out new features and keeping up the growing online community. Now, almost 16 years later, we have 5 children and are active in numerous activities with them and a circle of friends, and I have several on-going projects. Time isn't what it used to be.

If I had unlimited time, I would modernize this community to be inline with the general evolution of social media and would relaunch the mobile app with all the features one would expect today. I would focus on taking actions to help the Community grow and would seek unobtrusive ads to fund the hiring of help to keep everything going. There would be better connections to modern gaming to fulfill the early purpose that I deemed to be a "social gaming community." Maybe I'd actually advance some of those early game projects, too.

However, since I don't have unlimited time, it's difficult. As far as I know, this is the last remaining community from the eras of the Nintendo DSi and Nintendo 3DS. It also grew to be the biggest one at its peak. I want to see it continue into the foreseeable future and have no plans to close it. But that doesn't mean it's smart for me to do, so I need to find a solution...

FUNDING:

These websites cost around $50 USD per month to host (way down from the $200 USD on the server two years ago). Add in email, domain names, and other costs, it's probably around $70 USD. Donations over Patreon and PayPal cover about 1/3 of that. (And I'm so grateful that there are members who value this Community enough to freely donate!) That leaves a shortfall of probably $45 USD every month.

For a while, I wasn't too concerned with the budget shortfall because this Community peaked at about $1,000 USD / month in ad revenue a decade ago (when hosting costs were about $500 USD), so I told myself for years that it all balanced out. I tried for a while to seek out ad providers to fund the costs, but they've all either gone the direction of being as invasive and obstructive as possible, or they have a very high bar of something like 50 million page impressions per year to qualify for simple banner ads. So I've left this Community ad-free for several years, aside from providing links to apps my brother (Skunkman) and I have made.

I can't keep up the paying out-of-pocket every month, so I need a new source of funding or the growth to an existing one. If members would like to donate on Patreon or on PayPal or see value in purchasing the mobile apps, that would be appreciated. If the revenue exceeds the expenses enough, then I can even justify pushing aside or discontinuing other projects to focus on modernizing or growing this Community.

UP-KEEP:

I am balancing so many projects with family and by myself that I only really have time for maybe a few hours per week to work on bug fixes and updates. The Help Desk has been piling up with its backlog of requests ranging from security issues to dreams of mobile games. A couple members have helped contribute at times to the codebase on GitLab, but I take care of the vast majority of updates on my own.

If there are any members who have knowledge of PHP and MySQL, go ahead and request access to the code repository. You'll be able to clone the websites locally to your computer and help whittle down that backlog in the Help Desk. It would be greatly appreciated.

Realistically, I can't add any major features alone at this point, but it doesn't mean that someone else can either add something or help collaborate with me to add something.

SELLING:

Finally, I have considered just selling the Community. I would want it to be to someone who would plan to keep it going and who could grow it, where I cannot. I don't want to sell to someone who will just take the member content and shut down everything.

The problem is determining a reasonable price. There are many factors to take into consideration: codebase, content/data, traffic, domain names, etc. Is it worth $1,000 USD? $40,000 USD? I really don't know. Also, would a buyer want to keep me in an advisory role for some period of time? Would the buyer be a company to merge everything into another network or an individual with a passion for websites like these?

If anyone is legitimately interested here, I am willing to talk, under the conditions I listed.