DPSimulation - New Donation Widget

Regular visitors to either this blog or the website may notice a new addition to the web pages, a donation widget. This now replaces the older button and is for various reasons, one being to increase visibility/awareness that we do accept donations to help towards our ever increasing costs.

Although I am still quite happy to fund the website as much as I possibly can, the rapid increase in content and a near ten fold increase in website users over the past 12 months means that costs grow along with this and at the current rate of growth, I won't be able to sustain it alone and have set a calculated target. However, this target is only based on the minimum calculation for current growth, further growth, content and visitor throughput by way of increased downloads is likely to make this figure obsolete, it's an evolving situation that I never envisaged. You may also notice that we do operate advertising on both websites and have tried to design this to be unintrusive but advertising only pays a contribution when an advert is clicked. No clicks = no income.

Donating helps maintain a free service for users whilst also allowing for the expansion and inclusion of all new content from not only myself, but other third party creators, we actually have some exciting plans lined up in the coming months. Maintaining this service also means that downloads are kept free and at high speed with no subscriptions or sign ups required, nor is there any download speed penalty for accessing the service for free.

I do appreciate that many people either cannot donate, or have already spent their hard earned money on the vast amount of payware available, and I completely understand this, times are hard. All that I ask is that if you do make use of our service and appreciate/like the content or are simply interested in supporting the service, then give what you can. Unfortunately, the new widget will not allow a lower value than £5.00 per donation, I am looking into ways this can be changed.

Another issue when starting this donation widget is that it begins at £0 and because there have been a very small handful of donations to the site this year, I want to thank the people who made them, the fact the bar starts on zero does not mean those donations were ignored or un-appreciated!

Finally, thankyou both for reading this and your understanding on the matter. It really is difficult to explain that a free site is not entirely free, at least for the host anyway!