Well gang, I am humbled, honored and pleased as punch at the overwhelming success of our December round of fundraising to work on the database end of the mudcat upgrade. While I just hoped for a few bucks to keep us plugging thru the (seemingly endless) cold winter months of central Pennsylvania, we actually got halfway to our total programmatic budgets extending thru the summer.

To date, the specialists and I have a fully functional opensource database slave in operation. At this juncture it is passively (attempting) mirroring our production server, serving as a backup and testing to make sure it accepts, stores and redelivers the data (in all it's infinite international diversity of crazy characters, encoding format, html tags, sanskrit... and spaw's posts). Incidentally, we will soon be sending out a request to verify your membership email addresses, update your passwords and I know of a few of you who may have to change your usernames slightly due to strange characters. More on this later...

Living in a college town and therefore using a lot of college staff as helpers, the summer is where we need to get the bulk of our programming done. While I am not hiring students, their absence affords us the time to invest outside our usual semester load.

Our third and final phase is planned for fall and will be for hardware to create basically 2 exact servers for redundant fail-over. That is to say, no more "mudcat is down" stuff.

So here I am with hat in hand once again requesting you to dig deep and give what you can to keep us going. All the same is still the case in how's and where's which you can find below.

Thanks all, having a ball with the work and I'll have more info coming soon.

Keeping this short, the best way to contribute in via Paypal. They have been very good to us over the years, cut us a break on their cut cuz we're awesome and allow us to accept any sort of currencies without conversion/transfer/banking fees. The account is max@mudcat.org which you can enter manually or by clicking the following links and buttons:

USD:

GBP:

EUR:

AUD:

CAD:

If you need to, you can also mail checks or money orders in US currency, ***made out to Max Spiegel*** to:

Max Spiegel
The Mudcat Cafe
PO Box 274
State College, PA 16804

In the UK, the kind kind folks knows as The (UK) Friends of Mudcat can help, hopefully posting below the information you will need to see that the funds are directed such that we can avoid the banking fees usually associated with international bank transfers.

And as always but especially during this holiday season, you can help mudcat by shopping at Amazon using the following links (though our cut won't show up till January and February):
amazon.mudcat.org or amazonUK.mudcat.org or amazonFR.mudcat.org or amazonCA.mudcat.org

The big upside is that once the upgrade is complete, mudcat.org will be completely sustainable on non-member ad clicks. Huuurrrrraaaaayyy! No more ads for members, and God willing, no more of my pesky contribution requests (read: begging). Also, until then, please take this as a reminder that clicking our ads is an extremely important/effective source of revenue for mudcat.org.

Thanks for your time and considerations