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Today is a big day for The Pony Archive / Z+
I have edited all reward tiers, and have added a few new tiers including a follower tier.
I wanted to thank you guys for the support over the years. I hope 2021 at least has some good moments and I plan to try to make many of those with you.
As some of you may know Z+ manages the network behind The Pony Archive, Ponybooru, Project Vinyl, (few other smaller sites) and also runs the online convention, Brony Bash.
These projects have taken a lot of work, time and money to make them into what they are today. There have been some changes structure wise, and some clarifications on things. We'll start with what's changed, some quick clarification(s), and a what's next.
What's changed?
The $5 tier and over now offer requests for physical printed badges. Some of you may have seen these in previews for when I was beginning a run of them for The Pony Archive. These are printed on hard plastic cards similar in size to a credit card or hotel room key. A picture of a few badges will be posted in a week or so when I have more time to tweak them.
Once I've perfected a few badges to choose from, users can submit a request to get a badge from me from the pool of badges. I'd love to do a "meme of the month" badge but I'm going to be honest when I say I don't think I'll be that active in printing out badges.
There are now very clear descriptions of the discord roles you can optionally receive and what they offer.
Tiers now also give Ponybooru badges, not to be confused with the physical badge rewards. There's a few different tiers of them. The length of subscription required to have badge permanence has not yet been determined.
Some clarification:
I thought it would be important to make the distinction that while Z+ may be the umbrella under which these all reside, the policies for each site and project are managed separately. I get asked this question more often than I really anticipated , and it never really changes.
Another important clarification about another question I get asked often. "Can I support one site and not the other(s)?" Well, depending on the site, absolutely. But unfortunately that doesn't extend to monetary support as everything is mostly contained within the network and separation of income is extremely hard when it's just me managing everything. Your support goes towards the network, and that ensures *everything* stays up.
Non-monetary support can come in many forms. The Pony Archive always accepts donations of files for archival, even paid content that will not be shared publicly. You can also help by giving us links to things that need archiving or asking to help out some of the coding projects that arise.
Ponybooru loves active users, making some jokes on the forums or contributing tags, uploading content or just generally hanging out.
What's next?
Well we're putting up a new server soon for the Z+ network.
We're still in need of about $950 worth of hard drives (8, 8TB disks) and $350 worth of DDR4 server memory (8x 16GB rdimms). I've been slowly building up the server past few months and am close to getting the ram leaving just the hard drives as needed.
This will not raise overall monthly operational expenses by more than about $5 as we're recouping the cost of colocation by discontinuing the last rented servers in the Z+/ TPA network.
With this new server in place, the Z+ network will be entirely self-owned. It is also expected that Z+ will begin being able to offer VPS services officially about a month after deployment of the server and migration of running services to determine the amount of resources free.
I can't magically expect 2021 to be better, but we can try together. Thank you for reading, thanks for the support. Look to see you again sometime soon!
PS: If you are still on the Patreon you should migrate over to the Subscribe Star here.
PM me for rewards, I'll need your discord username / ponybooru username / username you'd like to be credited with on TPA if desired.
I wanted to thank you guys for the support over the years. I hope 2021 at least has some good moments and I plan to try to make many of those with you.
As some of you may know Z+ manages the network behind The Pony Archive, Ponybooru, Project Vinyl, (few other smaller sites) and also runs the online convention, Brony Bash.
These projects have taken a lot of work, time and money to make them into what they are today. There have been some changes structure wise, and some clarifications on things. We'll start with what's changed, some quick clarification(s), and a what's next.
What's changed?
The $5 tier and over now offer requests for physical printed badges. Some of you may have seen these in previews for when I was beginning a run of them for The Pony Archive. These are printed on hard plastic cards similar in size to a credit card or hotel room key. A picture of a few badges will be posted in a week or so when I have more time to tweak them.
Once I've perfected a few badges to choose from, users can submit a request to get a badge from me from the pool of badges. I'd love to do a "meme of the month" badge but I'm going to be honest when I say I don't think I'll be that active in printing out badges.
There are now very clear descriptions of the discord roles you can optionally receive and what they offer.
Tiers now also give Ponybooru badges, not to be confused with the physical badge rewards. There's a few different tiers of them. The length of subscription required to have badge permanence has not yet been determined.
Some clarification:
I thought it would be important to make the distinction that while Z+ may be the umbrella under which these all reside, the policies for each site and project are managed separately. I get asked this question more often than I really anticipated , and it never really changes.
Another important clarification about another question I get asked often. "Can I support one site and not the other(s)?" Well, depending on the site, absolutely. But unfortunately that doesn't extend to monetary support as everything is mostly contained within the network and separation of income is extremely hard when it's just me managing everything. Your support goes towards the network, and that ensures *everything* stays up.
Non-monetary support can come in many forms. The Pony Archive always accepts donations of files for archival, even paid content that will not be shared publicly. You can also help by giving us links to things that need archiving or asking to help out some of the coding projects that arise.
Ponybooru loves active users, making some jokes on the forums or contributing tags, uploading content or just generally hanging out.
What's next?
Well we're putting up a new server soon for the Z+ network.
We're still in need of about $950 worth of hard drives (8, 8TB disks) and $350 worth of DDR4 server memory (8x 16GB rdimms). I've been slowly building up the server past few months and am close to getting the ram leaving just the hard drives as needed.
This will not raise overall monthly operational expenses by more than about $5 as we're recouping the cost of colocation by discontinuing the last rented servers in the Z+/ TPA network.
With this new server in place, the Z+ network will be entirely self-owned. It is also expected that Z+ will begin being able to offer VPS services officially about a month after deployment of the server and migration of running services to determine the amount of resources free.
I can't magically expect 2021 to be better, but we can try together. Thank you for reading, thanks for the support. Look to see you again sometime soon!
PS: If you are still on the Patreon you should migrate over to the Subscribe Star here.
PM me for rewards, I'll need your discord username / ponybooru username / username you'd like to be credited with on TPA if desired.
