I find that a bit demeaning to Aster. Like, your stuff’s not worth 15 bucks a year. Meanwhile, please subscribe $5/mo to our expensive patreon.
The "Hooray for Future Plans" Thread (Plans for future stewardship of comps and community resources)
I’d rather not switch to a subdomain. it’s ~$20/year and renews in november, so there’s time, doesn’t have to be now (or this november). I just don’t want to keep paying for it forever you know?
jkj, I appreciate the defense, but I wasn’t aware that the offer was connected to the patreon? Last I checked it just gives private discord channels access and a discount or two.
An alternative way might be to submit a grant application for, say, $200 for a commitment on the IFTF’s part to pay domain fees for 10 years: Grants Administration Committee.
As recently as last December the TADS.dev domain hadn’t even been renewed. It’s a new site - is the TADS community relying on it now? If they’re not, yet, then it is fair to ask whether the IFTF should be taking on a commitment to register the domain in perpetuity.
I’m not suggesting perpetuity. A static site can be zipped up and put in a subdomain, no problems. I’m assuming the extras storage is not a problem. However this will break any existing links out there on the internet to the original site.
That’s why, if you take on the responsibility for the material, you have to take the domain as well - at least for a while.
Perhaps something like two years or so, then deprecate the original site and drop the domain.
Something along those lines would be sensible.
I get this, trust me. I have a couple of sites that I’ve been paying for for a long time.
Even on the scale of IFTF’s small budget, $20/year is a pretty small expense. Last year I blew $70 in a month on this experiment and was like, oops, that didn’t work, turn it off and try something else.
On the other hand, Dannii’s question is relevant. How much does the TADS community rely on this resource? There are a lot of domains that we could host.
I guess the question is: is there someone who would look at this and say “hey, IFTF is supporting a resource I use, I’ll hit the donate button and throw in five bucks”. If there’s a few such people per year, then (by definition) it’s something the community wants to support.
fair point, I don’t know how to funnel people toward using it 
(would welcome help on that too)
What would be ideal would be for the community to maintain the main tads.org domain, but we don’t have control of that. If we ever did though, it would certainly be worth the IFTF having custody of.
A long time ago I was thinking of writing an open plea to pass the organization of ECTOCOMP. I have no time even for asking for help.
The urge to get my hands less occupied by community tasks has fallen a little, so, in that case, I will like a cohost for the next ECTOCOMP 2025. I would really really really like to have someone to help with, and in the future hand over the baton.
For example, int he past edition I didn’t manage to preserve all the games in the IF archive. I have no material time to do so, at the moment.
Said all that, ECTOCOMP is a personal source of happiness every year, and I better have it handicaped that not having it.
I think cohosting is a great idea!
I tried getting someone to help run Spring Thing with me last year and a lot of people I talked to were not interested because it sounded intimidating and they didn’t know what it entails.
So it might help if you outline a couple of possible ways people could help and clearly mark out what the responsibilities are, since some people are more comfortable with some things than others. So some possibilities might be:
-Someone to deal with opening and closing the itch competition and setting dates and with uploading games to the ifarchive.
-Someone to handle all forum and social media posts
-Someone to answer emails from authors (they would be given a list of common questions and answers and only forward questions to you that weren’t on that list)
-Someone to handle coming up with themes and cover art
Also, a lot of people are scared of long-term commitment, so you could ask something like ‘1 year commitment only’ or ‘2 year commitment’.
I think IFTF advertises volunteer opportunities from time to time. Maybe IFTF could help spread the word that you are looking for help?
Nah, this forum has all the potential reach within the community.
-Yup.
-Yup.
-That rarely happens, nowadays all doubts comes from social networks. Or this forum.
-Yup.
I don’t think there’s anything to be scared of. I look for someone that loves ECTOCOMP so much as I do, to just, some day, continue with the philosphy of the event. But they won’t be alone, I’ll probably continue hosting the competition for some more years, but better with company.
Actually, a lot of you already help a lot with it, just unofficially, with the filing of the games at IFDB. Hey, even, it could be a good idea to have even more than 2 people, even just open those task for community help. Hmmm.
Thanks for the advice, Brian!