|
[img width=700 height=527]http://i.imgur.com/DJPSjbB.gif[/img]
We interrupt your regularly scheduled program to bring you the March 2019 edition of the RF Generation's Site News! In this issue, we would like to update you on our site Donation Drive, announce our April 2019 community playthrough title, unveil the next game for our site shoot 'em up club, and of course, thank those members who sent in submissions to our site and registered approvals last month. Thanks for keeping it on Channel 3!
REMEMBER: If you have any news about upcoming events or topics that you think the site needs to hear about, please PM singlebanana and put "RFG Site News" in the subject line. Who knows, maybe your news will make our front page!
Continue reading All Our News Are Belong To You: March 2019 Edition
[img width=700 height=527]http://i.imgur.com/DJPSjbB.gif[/img]
We interrupt your regularly scheduled program to bring you the February 2019 edition of the RF Generation's Site News! In this issue, we would like to update you on our site Donation Drive, announce our March 2019 community playthrough title, unveil the next game for our site shoot 'em up club, check in on our 2019 NES Site Challenge, and of course, thank those members who sent in submissions to our site and registered approvals last month. Thanks for keeping it on Channel 3!
REMEMBER: If you have any news about upcoming events or topics that you think the site needs to hear about, please PM singlebanana and put "RFG Site News" in the subject line. Who knows, maybe your news will make our front page!
Continue reading All Our News Are Belong To You: February 2019 Edition
[img width=700 height=527]http://i.imgur.com/DJPSjbB.gif[/img]
We interrupt your regularly scheduled program to bring you the January 2019 edition of the RF Generation's Site News! In this issue, we would like to give thanks to our staff for their efforts in 2018, take a moment to discuss our upcoming site Donation Drive in February, announce our February 2019 community playthrough title, unveil the next game for our site shoot 'em up club, update you on our recent 2019 NES Site Challenge, and of course, thank those members who sent in submissions to our site and registered approvals last month. Thanks for keeping it on Channel 3!
REMEMBER: If you have any news about upcoming events or topics that you think the site needs to hear about, please PM singlebanana and put "RFG Site News" in the subject line. Who knows, maybe your news will make our front page!
Continue reading All Our News Are Belong To You: January 2019 Edition
[img width=600 height=427]http://i1029.photobucket.com/albums/y359/necrom99/RFGen%20Blog/tv_zps2q0ywpgm.gif[/img]
If January seemed to fly by, then February zoomed by as fast as a spikey, blue weasel...... Welcome back friends to the March 2017 edition of RF Generation's Site News! In this issue, we announce April's community playthrough game and a welcome change to the playthrough forum, pronounce the death of our IRC chatroom and announce the birth of a new means of site communication, provide the new dates and location for Retro World Expo 2017, and of course, thank those members who sent in submissions to our site and registered approvals during the month of February. Thanks for adjusting your "bunny ears" and tuning in to this edition of the Site News!
REMEMBER: If you have any news about upcoming events or topics that you think the site needs to hear about, please PM singlebanana and put "RFG Site News" in the subject line. Who knows, maybe your news will make our front page!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Continue reading All Our News Are Belong To You: March 2017 Edition
[img width=640 height=360]http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/dk-quarter.jpg[/img]
Our annual donation drive starts today! Be sure to hit that donation button and show this great site some love. And don't forget, for every $10 you donate, you will receive a ticket for this year's raffle!
Keep in mind that RF Generation is a free, no advertising or pop-ups, not-for-profit site. All database contributions come from member submissions and our unpaid staff works hard to update and improve database content, keep front page articles fresh and informative, and produce podcasts for your listening pleasure. Unfortunately, the costs associated with running and maintaining this site are not free (...or cheap) and we need YOUR help to keep our site moving forward into 2018. All donations will go directly to our server and site improvement account. This year our goal is to raise at least $1500 by the end of February. I will provide updates on the front page throughout the month to help monitor how close we are to obtaining our goal and will also thank all donors by name for their contributions (donation amounts will be kept private).
Thank you for your continued love and support,
The staff at RF Generation
If you donated to and followed our February donation drive this year, you know that our staff donated several wonderful prize lots for our raffle (http://www.rfgeneration.c...m/index.php?topic=16247.0). For every $10 donated, participants received a ticket into this year's prize raffle. Donors received emails verifying their donations, names were placed on tickets depending on each donors' donation amount, these tickets were counted and recounted to verify accuracy, and my lovely daughter and I mixed up the tickets and placed into a bowl for a drawing. The names of seven members were drawn at random to determine our winners.
As the rules for the raffle state, the first name drawn will have first choice of the seven lots, the second member drawn will choose from the six remaining lots, and so on and so on. Congratulations to this year's winners! You will be contacted soon to claim your prize. For those of you who didn't win this year, our condolences, but know that your donations are very much appreciated and that we will be working hard to make the site a better place over the next year. Keep it on Channel 3.
As all of you who followed December's fund drive know, our staff donated several wonderful prize lots for our donors' raffle (http://www.rfgeneration.c...m/index.php?topic=14799.0). For every $10 donated, participants received a ticket into this year's prize raffle. Names were placed on tickets, these tickets were mixed up and placed into a bowl, and 6 names were drawn at random to determine the winners.
As the rules for the raffle stated, the first name drawn will have first choice of the six lots, the second member drawn will choose from the five remaining lots, and so on and so on. Congratulations to this year's winners! You will be contacted soon to claim your prize. Also, thank you again to everyone who donated during the fund drive and helped to keep our site going for 2015.
As you all know, we recently held our annual donation drive, which was a huge success, meeting our goal to have enough funds to pay for the server throughout the year. However, something has changed here at RFGen. The Collectorcast has been a runaway success, and while that’s awesome for Duke.Togo, Crabmaster2000, and WildBil52, its putting a strain on our servers. Due to the increased traffic and bandwidth use, our host is requiring us to upgrade to a bigger and faster setup. This as I’m sure you all can guess, means a heftier price tag. Which means the funds we raised earlier will no longer suffice. But we won’t be holding another donation drive this year; instead, we’ve decided to change our business model a bit. Don’t worry, we’re not going to going to be adding ads, we would never resort to that...
We’ll still be funded solely by donations, but instead of the few paying for the many, the many will now be paying for the many. In other words, RFGeneration.com will now be a pay-to-use site. I know, I know, it sounds bad, but here’s the good news, you only have to pay once and you’ll never have to pay again, and you get to choose how much you pay. So click the Donate button in the forums and set your payment amount. Once your payment is verified, you’ll be allowed to access the forum and all those wonderful collection tools you know and love.
We'll still be allowing current members to access the site today so they can make this transition and get their payment in as soon as possible.
And remember, even though we keep it on Channel 3, we’re more like HBO now.
The 2013 Donation Drive has now concluded. Our goal was to raise $1000 in just over a month's time. But were we successful? Well, yes, but not quite technically. In the time frame of the donation drive, we received $995.78. But, we also received an additional $40.75 from the auction of the guest interview spot on the Collectorcast. And another $6.00 from some Atari games I donated to the cause. And then we received an additional $60 donation just after the deadline. So we did receive enough to keep the site alive for another year! But since we didn't reach the goal within in the time frame of the donation drive, there won't be an all-expense paid trip to Hawaii for the donors like I was planning. Oh well, guess there's always next year.
Seriously though, I'd like to thank everyone who helped us out this year, it really is greatly appreciated. Just like we rely on members for our DB information, we also rely on our member donations to pay for our server. We really mean it when we say we wouldn't be here without our devoted members.
So thanks to all these people who donated this year:
- Sack
- Engel 762
- OatBob
- Bildtstar
- Razor Knuckles
- nupoile
- Techie413
- slackur
- moonraker_fats
- bum-man
- CoinCollector
- singlebanana
- Wempster
- RetroRage
- Sauza12
- ryanflucas
- ericeskapade
- Johnny Nintendo
- fatken53
- monkees19
- Barracuda
- DaveMMR
- Silver80
- pwpcody
You 24 may now proudly tell everyone that you helped support THE Classic and Modern Video Game Databases financially.
And of course, there are the matter of some prizes to be handed out. First off, if you've been listening to the Collectorcast, you've been hearing all about the donors as they donated, and there's still plenty more to come in the next episode.
If you've been keeping up on the Podcast section on the forum, you've probably already heard that nupoile won the auction to be on a future episode, so we've all got that conversation to look forward to.
And the biggest donor we had this year was Sack who donated an astounding $200! This awesome donation entitles him to have his choice of any two items from the RFGeneration Store.
Again, thanks to all who donated this year, and in past years. If you wanted to donate but didn't have the extra funds to do so, don't worry, you can donate at any time. Just click on the little "Donate" toward the top of the forum page. Or you can shop at our store, each sale price includes a percentage that goes back to us.
[img align=right height=325]http://www.rfgeneration.com/images/repository/14618donate.jpeg[/img]
The 2013 RFGeneration Donation Drive is nearly over! Have you donated yet? If you have, thank you, it is very much appreciated. Your money is hard at work keeping us online for everyone to enjoy the database and forum, ad free. If you haven't donated yet, you have until February 1st to get this year's extra special prizes, but you can still donate any time of the year. If you're not planning on donating, we may send our most dangerous Canadian, Crabmaster, after you. And we wouldn't want that to happen.
If you're on the fence about donating, here's some reasons why you should donate.
- This site is completely free for everyone to use, and its 100% ad free. Something I'm sure everyone knows is incredibly rare these days on the Internet. What other websites do you know of that don't have any ads?
- Our Database is huge and its expensive to host. It costs us about $1000 a year to pay for a host that keeps this site up and running at a good speed. It takes a lot of storage space to keep 80,000 DB entries, and 150,000 images.
- You don't need to donate a lot. Whatever you're comfortable donating is fine with us. Whether its $100 or $5, every little bit helps. If everyone who reads this donates just $5, we'd likely meet our goal by February 1st.
- If we meet our $1000 goal, you won't have to look at any more of these messages for another year. If we don't, expect another round of these we start running low on funds.
- You actually get something for your donation. Every donation will get you the coveted Donor rank on the forum which gives you access to a special forum board where you can read about upcoming features and just chat with fellow donors. And if you're the top donor this year, you'll get any two items from our Cafepress store. And thanks to the Collectorcast, you can donate $5 to have your name read on the podcast, donate $20 and have all your pickups read, or donate $30 to get access to the "pilot" episode of the Collectorcast.
- You can donate without actually donating. If you'd rather get something in return for helping us out, you can buy some merchandise from our CafePress store. You can buy some awesome products, spread the word of RFGen, and 10% of sales go back to us. If there's nothing there you can't live without (which I doubt, because that Beer Stein is amazing) you can also bid on our GameGavel auctions. You can win a guest interview spot on the Collectorcast, (next bid is only $38.50) or you can win a great starter collection of Atari 2600 cartridges (next bid is only $6.50).
And to show everyone who the cool kids are this year, these are the awesome members that have already participated in the 2013 Donation Drive. If you want to see all the people who have donated in past years, click here.
- Razor Knuckles
- pwpcody
- monkees19
- ericeskapade
- fatken53
- ryanflucas
- slackur
- Sauza12
- Techie413
- Engel762
- Silver80
- moonraker_fats
- Barracuda
- RetroRage
- Wempster
- Bildtstar
Those 16 people have donated a total of $560.78, making the average donation about $35. I won't say you should try to match or exceed that amount, but if you did, it would be awesome.
And if you're looking to "win" this donation drive, there is currently a tie for the top donation of $100, so please exceed that so we don't have to decide who gets the prize package. If you've already donated, the prize goes to the top total donor during the drive, so you can donate more to add to what you've already donated.
Welcome to 2013! 2012 is now in the history books and what a year it was! A ton of new games, hardware, and images were added to the database. But more than that, we've added a lot of "behind the scenes" features and fixes that will help us out in 2013 and beyond. We've also learned a lot, like how important frequent backups are. So what else happened in 2012 you ask? Well, I'll remind you.
- Shadow Kisuragi took charge of fixing the regions in the European PS2 section of the DB, for the second time since his original work was lost in the outage.
- We added two new DB Contributors, Bildtstar and Raffa1985.
- TheGrue was added as a staff Programmer.
- We moved from a VPS with 1GB of RAM and 20GB of drive space. To a dedicated server with 4GB of RAM and dual 500GB drives.
- We switched the site to support only Android devices.
- We switched back to supporting other devices.
- We reached 80,000 scans in the database.
- The RFGeneration Collectorcast was introduced.
- Aeroc won the PAIN YOURSELF WITH SUBMISSIONS contest...again.
- Sirgin and Aeroc were added to staff as DB Contributors.
- We reached 70,000 titles in the DB.
- Shadow Kisuragi and his team finished fixing the regions on Euro PS2 and Xbox games.
I'd say that's a pretty good list, and it doesn't even mention the countless little things that have been tweaked or fixed over the year. So now that you've been reminded what's been happening around here. I'd like to take this time to remind how you can help the site you love. As always, you can help us become even better by simply making submissions to the DB, whether its an image or some information, it all helps. If you've already submitted everything you could and still want to help us out, you can help with the gift of a donation, as we are one week into our annual donation drive.
During the donation drive, we raise the money that is needed to keep the site online. This is the reason we have no ads on the site and can afford to have a server that can handle a database the size of ours. We're one week into the drive and have raised just over $100, or about 10% of our goal, so we've still got a ways to go. But don't worry, you know we love you, so we won't just take your money and not give anything back. Every donor gets the Donor rank on the forum and access to a special board on the forum. You also get your name forever immortalized on the Donors page. And thanks to the RFGeneration Collectorcast there are some extra special prizes. Everyone donating at least $5 will get their name mentioned on the Podcast, those donating $20 or more will have all of their scores mentioned in the next episode, and those donating $30 or more will get the download to the Episode 0 of the podcast. And best of all, the highest donor during the drive will receive an amazing prize pack including two items of their choice from the RFGeneration store, plus some other goodies that will be donated by staff members.
So please, donate to the cause if the thought of ads plastered on RFGeneration make you sick. Or if you just want to help out a friend that's always there for you.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone in RFGeneration Land! I hope you're all enjoying your time with family and friends, or maybe just a day off work or school. And I know you're going to be tracking all those new games you get right here at RFGen. After you add them to your collection here, you can brag about your holiday scores on our forum. And then you can use your new found games to fill in some missing info in our database. Heck, you can probably spend all day right here, and you know what, in all that time you'll find many things, but there's one thing you will not find, advertisements. It's true, you can turn off your Ad Block Plus and nothing will change, no annoying pop-ups or banner ads. I wish I could say we can do this because it doesn't cost anything to have a website, but unfortunately, it does get rather expensive paying for a host that gives us as much storage space and speed as we need to run a database as large as ours.
In order to stay afloat, we rely solely on the donations of our members. Its those member donations that have kept us online for the past 8 years and hopefully for many more years to come. And even though we have just as many (if not more) video games in our database as Wikipedia, we don't quite need the $16-20 million they raise during their donation drives. But we do need roughly $1000 for a year's worth of hosting, so whether its $1 or $100, every bit helps us out. And every cent donated to us (minus PayPal's fee of course) goes to paying for our server. Our staff doesn't get a dime, despite their hundreds of hours of work, and the money will not pay for any contest prizes, that comes out of own pockets.
Now that you're surely wanting to give us some of your money, I'll sweeten the deal even more for you. Every donor will receive the super awesome Donor rank on the forum, which will give you access to a top secret forum board where you often get to read about upcoming news and features before everyone else. And thanks to the RFGeneration Collectorcast there are some extra special prizes. Everyone donating at least $5 will get their name mentioned on the Podcast, those donating $20 or more will have all of their scores mentioned in the next episode, and those donating $30 or more will get the download to the Episode 0 of the podcast. But wait, there's even more! The person who donates the most during our donation drive will receive an amazing prize pack including two items of their choice from the RFGeneration store, plus some other goodies that will be donated by staff members.
The donation drive will end on February 1st, so you have roughly one month to participate in the contest. If you just want to give and don't care about the contest, feel free to donate $5, $20, or whatever you feel your experience at RFGeneration is worth.
If you're a little burnt out on cash due to the holidays, don't worry, you'll still be able to donate all year long, and it'll be as much appreciated then as it is now. You just may have to wait a little longer to get that sweet Donor rank on the forum, as I'll only be checking for new donations once a month rather than daily.
Well I am very pleased to announce that due to the huge response we've gotten from the community we have already reached our goal of keeping the site funded throughout the rest of the year. Over the past week, we've raised a total of $505 from 17 different donors. As agreed, I will throw in the remaining $300 or so to cover the costs for the remainder of the year. It's now official that RFGen is safely funded until 2012. We will continue accepting donations through the rest of January and throughout the rest of the year. These donations will go towards keeping the site running next year, so no matter when you donate you can be sure you're helping secure the future of the site.
Special thanks goes out to all of our donors who generously donated in our time of need: Ben, Brian, James, Michael, Peter, Scott, James, Scott, Ryan, Terry, Adam, Ryan, Stuart, Chris, Richard, Den, and Cobra Blade. It's through your support (in both donations of time and money) that RFGen has become the great site and community it is today. Again, if you donated and I haven't been able to add you to the donor group in the forums, please PM me so I can add you.
A big thanks to everyone that pitched in and as always, keep it on channel 3!
A couple of months ago, we held the annual donation drive to raise money to pay the server bills for the coming year. Throughout the two months, we raised a total of $218, which at a rate of $85/month is enough to get us halfway through March before we run out. So as a last ditch effort, we're making a final push to raise donations so that RFGen can make it through another year.
As we have said time and time before, this site is run completely by volunteers and operated on donations from the community. Any money donated is strictly used for paying off the operating costs of running the site (aka the server bill). It's because of the generous support of the RFGen community that we've been able to provide the tools and community forums that we have all come to love.
As an added incentive, I will personally match all donations given in the month of January until we raise enough to pay off the the bills for the remainder of the year. Let's keep this thing going for another year!
You can follow this link to make a donation.
Thanks in advance and remember to keep it on channel 3!
PS: If you've donated and aren't a member of the donor group in the forums, remember to send me a PM so I can get you added.
A big thank you goes out to the following members who recently donated: James, Jesse, Hans, Holt, Brian, Maxime, David, Michael, and Richard
We currently have $162 in the account so we're still in need of additional donors to step up and help the cause. Again, 100% of donations go towards offsetting the server costs of running the site. It's the gracious help of our many donors and volunteers that keeps the RFGen community going strong. We really appreciate those who have supported the site and the staff and members of RFGen send you our heartfelt thanks.
To those who haven't donated, we are still trying to raise enough money to cover the site costs and every little bit helps. Any amount you can afford to donate would be greatly appreciated.
PS: If you've donated and aren't a member of the donor group in the forums, remember to send me a PM so I can get you added.
You can follow this link to make a donation.
|
