Hello WWEnders,

We're very excited to announce the start of the Worlds Without End Patreon Campaign (https://www.patreon.com/wwend ). You may have seen the banners sprinkled around the site already but this email is our first push to jump-start the campaign.

Worlds Without End is now, and should always be, a free resource to the genre fiction community but real life circumstances have changed and we are looking for a little help from our members and fans. We recently lost our free web hosting arrangement with our former employer so we are now having topay out of pocket for hosting, domain names, and all those other bits of software etc. that go along with running a website. In addition, we have spent many hundreds of hours developing the site and, with the new WWEnd 3.0 in the pipeline, we are spending more and more of our free time on upgradesand new features. All that time comes at a personal cost that is getting harder and harder to justify to ourselves and our families.

To rectify the situation we have embarked upon a plan to monetize the site in a number of ways that won't negatively impact user experience. Advertising, swag, a tip jar, and Patreon are some of the things that you'll see rolling out over the next several months on the current site. If you like what we're doing here and want to further our efforts you'll have plenty of opportunities to do so.

With your support we'll be able to keep the lights on and put a little incentive money in our pockets to keep us pushing forward on the new site. We'll be posting updates on our Patreon site and in the forums about our progress along with some sneak peeks of coming features for our patrons to go with the incentives we've already built into the campaign. Those incentives will grow with the launch of the new site too so what you see now is not the end of the goodies.

Please take a look at our Patreon campaign (https://www.patreon.com/wwend ) and if you are ready to take our relationship to the next level pick a patron tier and click the button.

We thank you for your support!

Dave, Chris, and Rico

You have certainly raised some valid points.  It's true, there have been no major upgrades in the past few years but there is much going on behind the scenes that you haven't seen yet.  We have spent a huge amount of time developing WWEnd 3.0 which is a ground-up re-write of the entire site that will bring us into the modern age.  The new site is in every way superior to what you see here and has a host of new features that will indeed take WWEnd far past our glory days.

I can tell you all kinds of stuff about it but "seeing is believing" as they say and I want to show you just how far along we are.  To that end I would like to give you a tour of the 3.0 website.  My Skype handle is davewwend and I am pretty much always online so you can ping me whenever you want or we can set a time.  It will take at least 30 minutes to get through it all.  I look forward to hearing from you!

If continuous updates was going to get us where we wanted to go we would have done that.  A massive re-write was the only option for several reasons:

This site is old.  We'e been running on the same base ASP code for 15 years.  Nobody uses ASP anymore.  There's only so far you can go with a dead code base that won't be supported much longer.

The site login piggybacks the forum which is quite possibly the last ASP forum in the world and was last updated in 2004.  We went with an ASP forum to match the site code which was fine a decade ago but is clearly not the case today.  It lacks many of the features you want in a forum and seems to go out of it's way to make communicating harder than it should be.  It sucks all by itself and has to be replaced which requires a new code base again.

The site predates mobile internet and is not responsive.  Making a non-responsive site responsive requires a complete re-write all by itself.  About half of all our visitors come in on a smartphone and the panning and scanning you have to do on your phone is maddening.  They don't stay long for a reason.

I'm sure I could come up with many more reasons for the complete re-write but I'll leave it at this:  We want this site to be awesome for you guys and for ourselves.  We feel all the pain as users and as the guys responsible we feel like the site lets us all down in it's current state.  A site about sci-fi should at least use current web standards and be usable on current technology.  As professional web developers it's rather embarrassing to be honest.  We want this to be an example of our best work.  Not our best work from 10 years ago.

As for your other question we will be adding a PayPal donation option to the site soon-ish.  It'a always been part of the plan but we can only do so much at once and we're already struggling to get the Patreon thing right.  Our mass email to let everyone know about the campaign choked and only a small fraction of the emails actually went out.  Thanks again to our ASP forum.  I had to research mass email services, get us signed up, and figure out the interface so we can try again -- all in the past couple days.  All that required us to set up PayPal so we should have that one-time donation option up next week.

Just in case there are folks reading this who don't know there are only 2 of us building the new site and maintaining the current site.  Our Uber Users are doing all of the data updates and doing a fine job but it's only whargoul and I hacking away at this stuff in our spare time as real life allows.  It is taking far longer than we ever would have imagined but we're still grinding it out as best we can.  If that sounds like a woe is me it's not meant that way.  We're still having fun and we are super excited to show off the new site and as members we can't wait to use those new features ourselves.

Ha!  Yeah, hobby is too weak a term.  Maybe passion project or just plain obsession?  I build web sites for a living and there is always some compromise that has to be made for the client and the content is usually of no interest to me personally.  This one is all mine as far as design, features, and user experience go and of course I love the content!  This one is my baby and I want it to be everything that I was looking for but couldn't find.  I won't take less and I won't deliver less than my absolute best.

We are a company.

I'm standing by to relieve your fears SKYPE

I like to be as transparent as possible with everyone on the site cause this really is your site too.  We get a ton of help from our Ubers and great ideas and feedback from all our members so we want ya'll to know what is in the works.

I actually looked into that at one time.  The problem is we are small stakes for any investors.  One guy I talked to got interested when I told him we had 6,000 members... but only because he assumed we were charging $10/month for access.

We have posted a couple patron-only sneak peeks of the 3.0 site over on the Patreon blog in case you missed it.

TonkaToys - 2018-10-16 9:02 AM Thanks for the hard work chaps; I'm a relatively new user but I think the site is good in its current form, so the new version must be really great! Anyway, I hope you get the PayPal donation; it went to lcow.comLLC; I hope that is you

Thanks Tonka, for the kind words and the donation!  It did get to us, and is very much appreciated.  We are super excited to be getting work done on the new version of the site because it really is far superior across the board.

Thanks, DJ!  Really appreciate the signal boost!

I just posted another Sneak Peek over on the Patreon blog.  This time we're showing off changes to the RYO Reading Challenge pages for WWEnd 3.0.

If you are currently a patron, many thanks for your continued support!  If you are not a patron yet we hope you'll consider taking our relationship to the next level so that we can continue to take WWEnd to the next level.

New post up over on Patreon showing off the new book page on 3.0. Take a look and let us know what you think.

Click the button above to see the new post.

Cheers!

I just updated our Patron page which was woefully out of date since the Blow Up.

Our Patrons

Many thanks to all our Patreon and PayPal supports! Your generous contributions are making a difference already including helping us pay for our new VPS service so we won't go down again. <*doffs hat*>

If you are ready to join their illustrious ranks just click the Patreon and PayPal links in the sidebar and elsewhere on the site. It's never too late.

Thank you for your support!

It's been awhile since I last updated the Patreon page which I keep meaning to do. In a nutshell, the 3.0 site has been coming along in fits and starts over the last couple years. Real life keeps getting in the way, as it is wont to do, so it has been really hard to get any momentum. Mostly this is just the usual stuff moving house, kids going off to school, getting laid off from work, finding a new job, maintaining the current site etc. etc.

Strangely, the Corona virus has put me in a better position to work on the site. Working from home saves me a lot of time from my commute and lunch breaks to actually work on the new stuff and respond quicker to updates on the live site. We're making some really good headway at the moment -- long may it last!

I'll get an update posted on Patreon and include some new screenshots of the updates sometime this week -- fingers crossed. If you would like the nickel tour we can meet up on Skype and I'll show you what we're up to. That offer is good for any interested WWEnders, especially our supporters.

thejessleigh - 2021-05-13 2:31 PM Hi! Are there any updates on 3.0? I kind of stopped using this site through the pandemic. I still really like the RYO features, and think the community has potential, but the engagement is so low that it's hard to remember to keep checking. I suspended my patreon support for a bit due to personal finance issues, but if the site is still in the works I'd love to get back into it. Also, my offer to contribute to any open source work (especially with Python, database admin, and cloud hosting) is still open

The 3.0 site is still alive and improving but it's happening in fits and starts. We'll make some major updates then fall off for a few weeks the jump back in to implement something new then drift away again. We've been doing that since long before Covid but Covid seems to amplify the problem.

You're right about engagement dropping off. Lots of visitors still coming day in and day out but everyone just pops in to find a new book. Nobody has any energy to interact anymore it seems. I'm barely keeping up with data updates and award announcements and some 3.0 edits here and there. But I don't have anything left in the tank these days to rally the faithful.

I'll catch my second wind for the 100th time and lurch forward a few more steps soon enough.