I am sorry if I posted this on the wrong forum, but I didn't think of another one that was more appropriate.

I have a question: Have you guys ever considered doing patreon to fund big improvements to the mud?

Things that come to mind:
-Hardware improvements
-graphic design work for the page
-Hire someone as a temp to do a major coding. Aka. code your own mud client with neat ways to interact with the mud.
-Marketing of the facebook page
-Google Adwords

I have seen far worst things getting huge amounts of support money this way, and it would definitely not harm the goal of free to play.

Jaegendar

-Hire someone as a temp to do a major coding. Aka. code your own mud client with neat ways to interact with the mud.

Being able to pay people goes a huge way towards running more efficiently. Having said that, CF is built on existing code (not its own proprietary stuff) and therefore cannot legally pay staff, or allow people to profit.

I'd kick in 50$ for as much/often as I play CF. I've gotten more enjoyment out of this game over the last decade than any game that I paid retail for. I'd imagine I'm also not alone. I know you can't turn a 'profit' but a fundraiser to beef up the hosted machine shouldn't fall under that umbrella?

Money actually isn't a resource we're particularly short on. The same is true of server specs too, actually. We can't quite afford to make it rain, but we're not going to disappear for financial reasons any time soon either.

The MUD runs great on the VM we have. We don't come anywhere close on CPU usage, we have RAM to spare and the SSD we upgraded to last year seems to have alleviated some of the I/O problems we were seeing.

We're not against spending our money but we do want to make sure we're confident there's ROI in something before we pay for it. Likewise, a precursor to buying stuff is usually having active and motivated immortals coming up with good plans and executing them, and that doesn't seem to be an area that gets a lot of attention these days.

Were the I/O problems database related? If so then there might be some low-hanging fruit there in terms of indexing, tweaking config params, etc.

I didn't (and don't) have the ability to diagnose those things on our server, but I assume the problems we had were more a symptom of perhaps an underwhelming or overloaded VM host than anything else.

The upgrade to a SSD and gigabit network connection seem to have helped a lot, though. Now, I would attribute what little lag (on our own) we see to the codebase itself.

As for the database, there's certainly some low-hanging fruit there. It's awful, but we also don't have a lot of use cases where that awfulness hurts us much.

Was just speculating that if there were a standard relational database anywhere in CF's architecture that the root cause of the high I/O might have been a poor indexing strategy. Or poor queries. If that's the case (and it probably isn't; I'm just spit-balling here) then juicing I/O bandwidth is really more of a band-aid.

"Likewise, a precursor to buying stuff is usually having active and motivated immortals coming up with good plans and executing them, and that doesn't seem to be an area that gets a lot of attention these days."

Both Umiron and I have had a little shot at this over the last 18 months. I'm going to post extensively on our Marketing Board later this afternoon to outline a few things and invite the players to chip in there.

As the OP initially pointed out, this isn't really Gameplay related, but I understand why he came here. Marketing has been neglected for a while.

Maybe even make more videos ;) Had 385 views, most watched it the full length, which is pretty damn surprising given it was a random plug during my Twitch event.

Averages about 50-75$ a month at the least, no?

Not that that is an amazing chunk of cash, but I'd imagine it pays for a lot of the fees involved (notice I said LOT not all).

Give me a way to use websockets instead of telnet to interact with the mud, then I'll build the client I want to use, put it on Github, and then anyone can build the client they want.

What you're looking for is https://github.com/kanaka/websockify