Hey all,

I'm really happy with how much we've grown over the past few months. The metrics only continue to go up. And while our little community has continued to grow and gain small popularity with the community using the board we have, we encounter lots of small hiccups with our current board software:

• Pages not loading correctly despite there being no issues from the host
• Poor support for member customizations and projects (blogs, clubs, etc)
• Poor support for downloadable content (which would be great for hosting client mods and themes)
• Poor support for SEO (a huge issue if we want to continue growing)
• Poor plugin integration (plugins conflict and don't play nicely with each other)

In my own testing, Invision Community (referred to as IPS) fixes all of the issues mentioned above. IPS is a paid board solution that offers lots of tooling and plugins for growing our community. It also offers conversions tools that work with our board so we can keep our memberships, topics, sections, and more.

We had this board software before when the board was operated by Michael, but it was nulled. I believe it's in our best interest to purchase the software license for it rather than risking hosting using a pirated copy. The cost of the solution is $499, which I can contribute $100 towards for getting us started. I'm asking for help from the community to crowd fund our forever license to use IPS for Cooldown.

After the funds are released to me, I'll purchase the license and begin work. The forum may not be upgraded for a month or two while I prepare the upgrade, but I intend to perform the upgrade as soon as possible after the purchase is made to alleviate peoples' frustrations with the current board. Thanks for your time and interest, and I hope you consider contributing (even if it's only a small amount).

Link: https://gofund.me/3263ccca

Also, I wanted to talk a little about my plans once we get the license...

I'd like to make Cooldown more game preservation focused:

• Conquer Online, Era of Faith, and other TQ games would be under a new "Game Preservation" section. We'd still have our independent section for Indie development, but that'd be a secondary focus.
• A Downloads plugin with IPS will let us host mods for Conquer Online and other games, and let it all be easily browsable.
• Clubs would allow groups of developers to share code and more using their own private forums.
• Blogs would let members write about their project development / showcase their work.
• Eventually, I'd like to add a plugin for showing private servers that are online, what their online status is, and how many discord members their discord has.

On top of that, having a more modern forum and theme would be very nice additions to the usability and management of the forums.

I can't do this alone though, so if you have the ability to donate, I would greatly appreciate that. Using non-pirated software is a must for this type of forum and the longevity of it, and I want to continue doing this forum and its members right. Thanks for reading.

Hey all! I got word that GoFundMe is unavailable in certain countries, so I added support for PayPal.

If you'd like to give it a try, then you'll get access to a new Donors group. It doesn't currently add anything besides the status on your posts, but I hope the addition of PayPal helps include those in countries such as China and Egypt. I'll close the GoFundMe once the sum of the two donation pools meets our goal. You can donate and check how much we've raised via PayPal here.

Thanks so much for your feedback!

Hey all! I had to remove the PayPal donation amount from the donation page... the plugin didn't work as expected and is listing some random value. Sorry for the lack of visibility. We're currently at $15 in donations from PayPal and $50 from GoFundMe. Thanks for your contributions, and I'll be sure to keep y'all updated regularly. I'll be very happy to get away from phpBB.