Here We Go Again!

So, first post on version 2 of RPGMP3 And Me!

Hal a pretty slow day. Been to Lindsay's sewing school and taught Lindsay's sewing teacher's husband how to use Photoshop. He picked it up pretty quickly. Got back here to some wrangling with the hosts for RPGMP3. We appear to be getting charged as a result of burstable billing. Essentially, when I post something to the site, I get a download spike (expected and not unusual), but even though I have 1.5TB of bandwidth per month and am only using about 650 - 700GB we are spiking over the average of 4.5MBits / second too often so they are charging me as if we were using much more bandwidth than we are.

I am currently looking into options like throttling the download speeds when things start to spike to keep the costs down. I always said that if the site could not sustain itself with donations and Patronships then I would take it down. I don't want to take it down. I love doing it. I think people get a lot out of it, but it is becoming something of a behemoth! Which I guess is kind of a good thing in a way, but it makes it costly to keep there.

Another option, that the host is keen on, is for me to purchase additional bandwidth to become essentially unmetered. This would sadly cost an additional $115 per month on top of the $150 we are already paying and I pretty sure thats not going to happen unless I managed to secure some bloody reliable advertising or double my Patronage.

To get the ball rolling again I have reinstalled the Donations Block that we used to have that tracks the donations people make and sets up a target. We lost a lot of donations when I took that down. It feels like begging to me but I guess if the site is going to stay supported I am going to have to do a little bit of that.

I have some great plans for expanding things. I have a whole new podcast planned and it even has its own website which is ready to receive it, but I have not had the time to get it recorded yet due to far too much coursework for my masters and a load of other things. I have put the equipment together a few times and then just not got round to doing it. Nerves I guess! Not really too confident with the whole presentation thing!

We have also been having some issues with getting the regular games running. Lots of family things from all sides and my work have put Beyond the Mountains of Madness on the back burner for 3 weeks and it looks like Rolemaster might be sitting it out again due to Mother's Day (that will make a month off). I have to say out of the two I am enjoying Rolemaster a whole lot more. I am hoping to finish Cthulhu (one way or another) before DnD 4e is released so that I can get a recording of that up as soon as possible after the release. I guess time will tell - if we ever manage to get another game in.

I want to push for them to play ever Sunday on RM (but some of them play a RIFTS game on the alternate weeks I think). I might see if we can squeeze RM in prior to the RIFTS game rather than have one week off give us such a huge time gap. We already play Call of Cthulhu every Thursday but we have missed a lot of time recently. I think the game is a little slow and it is quite badly edited making it stumble along. Sadly it looks like two out of the four characters are going to go bat shit crazy before they even really see the main plot. I guess that's an issue with starting with a low SAN in Cthulhu. I suspect if things go as I expect I might end up with a few dead and the rest fleeing the Antarctic before they have even flown across the mountains. It would be a shame but who could blame them?

I have summer coming up and hopefully that means some free time to see if I can slap the site around a little. I would love to do a redesign but I would need some help in order to take it on. A few people have offered a little assistance and I have a pretty solid plan for what I want to do with it but it is just finding the time to get it all done and then implementing it all.