We recently spent about $2,500 and 250 combined man hours working on getting a new server for the Rational Response Squad series of websites. The new website, increased speed, and tons of improved features will be up and running sometime in February. When that happens, another 300-600 combined man hours over a few months will help create the most feature friendly website (for the subscriber) and oddly enough, a lightning fast website for anonymous users who like to peruse our site to learn. This is the result of a drupal caching module that will be installed that primarily benefits users that aren't logged in, but helps increase time to logged in users as less of their resources are tied up. And paying members will want the extra server resources as they will have a much more feature enhanced site.

All of the network sites will be receiving massive upgrades, including forums on some of them. The new forums will look more like a cross between what we have now, vbulletin, and phpbb.

Network sites that benefit are:

• Margaret Downey
• Atheist Volunteers
• Prayers To Jake
• Free Thinking Teens
• Ask the Atheist
• Mr. GAWN
• WOTM Watchdog (looking for people to write wotm exposes)
• Greydon Square
• Christian Pwnage (on blogger now, coming to drupal soon with all the content in tact, new home of Rich Rodriguez our newest Core Member)
• Celebrity Atheists (doesn't use same name and password, looking for experienced mediawiki users to help keep things going)

Coming soon on the network:
Comedy Jesus
ReligionIsRetarded
The Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia!

We'll launch a new affiliate version of the site as a subdomain of rationalresponders.com to help unite atheist activists and group leaders all around the world.

AND MANY MORE SITES ON THE WAY!!

If you support the grassroots activity that led us to become the highest ranked atheist website in the world please help cover the exorbitant costs of keeping it all up and running. We receive more web traffic than 20-30 atheist orgs that earn more money than we do to keep their organization afloat.

EXPENSES

This year new server: $ 2,600

Next year new server (we hope): $3,000

First 11 months co-lo fee: $1,200

Next 12 months co-lo fee(2 servers): $2,000

The taxes we're gonna have to pay on receiving that income (roughly): $2,800

600-1200 combined man hours: Free

Unifying rational thinkers in a united front to help make this planet a better place: Priceless

___________________

$11,600

You can donate any amount from $3-$3,000. If you would like to make a donation of over $1,000 we can arrange for you to pay directly to a non-profit organization (tax deductible) who will use the money to pay their portion of the server fees. Contact Sapient to make such an arrangement. If you prefer to contribute to advertising the Rational Response Squad visit this thread.

The previous thread to donate, when Gizmo was running the server is here. He got himself about back to even on his investment, he thanks everyone for the help, and we thank all of you.