To the previous poster: if ads and donations are enough for Jader to run the site and make a living, why would you need a fee for it? Have you encountered many social networking sites that charge users? I'd say that is completely unlikely.

I was perfectly satisfied with the old donation system and think the new one will be even better. Your transparency is commendable.

Keep up the good work, Jader.

I don't visit this site much anymore as I don't play Animal Crossing a lot now. I think Jader should have announced that the donations are not needed a long time ago, but as he said it didn't cross his mind until now. I've never donated to ACC, mainly because when I used this site often I didn't have any way to donate and my parents didn't let me spend my money online in any way. Because I haven't personally donated I can't put myself in your shoes, but in my thinking you gave the money to ACC, and that money was put into building up and maintaining ACC. The amount of all donations given was posted on page 2 or 3 I believe, and that amount does not exceed all costs of Jader money spent on the site, and I'm not even including labor hours he put into this. ALL of the donated money DID go to this site, and he spent a little of the ad revenue on himself. The ad revenue is not money given by you, so I don't see why you feel you can dictate what he does with money that was not yours in the first place. Jader has done an amazing job of running a family friendly site that is provided to you for free (you are not forced to donate in any way). If you were to add up all the hours Jader put into this site for the 10 years he's kept it running and calculated $5 per hour of work it would add up to thousands of dollars. Here's a very simple calculation that most likely only equals about half the time he's put into this site:
There are 52 weeks in a year.
This site has been running for a little over 10 years.
I'm assuming 6 hours of work per week (In reality it's probably way more than 6 hours a week).
Jader is getting payed $5 per hour of work in my example (That's less than minimum wage right now in the US)
52 x 6 = 312 (hours worked in a year)
312 x 10 = 3,120 (hours worked in 10 years)
3,120 x 5 = 15,600 (15,600 is the amount of money earned at only $5 per hour)

3,120 hours and $15,600 is a lot of time and money to not get payed for.

Another point I'd like to make is most all of you have not run a site for 10 years, so please don't act like you are the "all knowing and completely just" judge of the internet.

tl;dr
1. Ads pay for what money Jader has used on himself, not your donations.

2. At one point Jader did need the donations to help run the site, but he forgot to change it when ads covered costs.

3. Jader has worked over 1,000 unpayed hours on something for you.

4. Jader asks for feedback and is trying to make things right, please don't disrespect and insult him instead of provide feedback.

Forgive people who have done wrong by you, especially when it was on accident. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you all!

*content removed*

I once gave a present to someone. I liked collecting rocks and a friends asked "to see" one. I gave her one and she immediately threw it in the nearest pond in school. (I was kinda devastated, as I gave her a good-looking rock and thought she'd want to admire it too...) I learned my lesson, to not freely give people things I hold dearly... But money? MONEY!? Really!?! *sigh* Do you love your money that much? What was it, the last allowance you were ever given? (I spent my $100 graduation money on 1/2 of a PS2 bundle back in the day and origami'd a bunch of $1 & $2 bills)

Is it principle? FEMA and the Red Cross were caught with not having spent the money where and when it needed to be spent. Look at the places hit by Hurricane Katrina for proof. (Can we already see it in places that were hit by Hurricane Sandy? Too soon?)

Major difference between FEMA/Red Cross and Jader is WHO/WHAT they were [i]MADE[/I] for! The former is to help people after disasters; the latter, for enjoyment. Would you dare hold them to the same standards? You kinda are. That's not fair. *content removed*

*sigh*

If only people could live off of what they LIKE doing(if indeed, Jader likes doing this). Most only dream/wish of doing something other than their day jobs and actually bring in some money.

*content removed*

As a side note: I've never donated and I don't know if I ever will. I did donate to Wikipedia seeing that that's a good source of information. I can't pinpoint the reason why I haven't/won't(?) donate to ACC as of yet. I hope there isn't any prejudgement on me for that. Whatever is decided, those that donated, their suggestions will mean more than mines. I wonder if is should have even commented on this thread in the first place.

-Staff Post (12/27/2012 9:20:51 PM)
This post violated the following rule:
1.4 Personal Insults & Attacks (Flaming)

Jader in no way has worked 3120 hours on the site. That's just not even close.

Well, technically. He's hosted the server 24/7 for ten years.

365 x 10 = 3650

Add in 2 leap years.

3650 + 2 = 3652 hours.

Yes but that's not actual work put into the website. He's just paying someone to run it for him.

"Jader in no way has worked 3120 hours on the site. That's just not even close."

Prove it.

Look at the site? I think that's all the proof you need.

Dodging the question. I want actual proof.

Well considering the fact that from like at least 2007 to this year we've gotten hardly any updates to the site at all. There's some proof.

Now I'd like you to provide proof that he HAS worked 3000 hours on the site.

We've most certainly gotten updates in the past five years. Just read all of the announcements to see.

I don't see any new feature additions other than new staff members and some new AC news.

OK, there was a big update at the end of July 2010 and another on 31 March 2012.

Instead of arguing over the situation, think of it this way. Jader says on page three that he has invested 40K on the website, plus 10-20K in hardware. Do you think all of this money went to nothing? You honestly don't think that in the 8 years of hosting this website he hasn't even spent 3000 hours on it? I don't understand why everyone is getting so worked up over this. Yes,it would have been nice to have been notified over this, we've been over this. No, it was not wrong of him. You want to know why? You put money into the website in the first place, wanting to support its funds. Its "funds" were Jader considering he runs the website. Not just himself, like he said, he really only used about 10%. In hindsight, that isn't a lot at all.

This is one of the honest, if not the most honest website/forum I've been a part of. I guarantee, any website that you are a member of that accepts donations, uses small percents of the funds toward the developers.

I will soon be donating, and I've been a long enough member to trust Jader, and I still will. This wasn't a "sneaky" move, maybe not the most well explained, but you shouldn't be to worked up over it

Those weren't from Jader, they were from the dev team.

^ You're contradicting yourself now. If the dev team, not Jader, does the updates, then the shortage of updates is nothing to do with Jader.

Remember when ACC went down a week or so ago? Do you think it just magically came back online after a short break? No, Jader (presumably along with various tech-people) was actively working to get the server back online. Said tech-people were probably getting paid, and this would obviously be paid from ACC funds (both donation money and ad revenue). Why shouldn't Jader get paid too?

That is just one example of Jader's input to ACC. As said above, if Jader had worked just six hours a week on average, he would far outstrip 3000 hours. If you had a website - and I actually mean a website you'd created yourself, not some random template from webs.com or some such - would you really work on it for less time than that? Jader has spent a lot of his time - and, in the early days, a lot of his money - working on ACC, and he deserves to be reimbursed.

Not from funds promised to go towards

"monthly costs[/bq]
As from my previous post:
[bq]It's been over four years since City Folk, and we've been promised all these great features, that don't exist. Instead it took him about 3 years to actually respond to the lack of updates, and then it was just passing the torch on to other's to clean up his mess.

I don't see any justification for the lack of updates. It takes time to make updates, I know, I've worked with websites. It doesn't take 4 years for one update, especially since even before the research and development team he was getting help from staff. The only updates that we have received, from him, are useless ones (Bell Ads), and others required by law (COPPA). And the updates we have right now barely even function."

(and yes I mean a real website)

10% isn't that much. If you donated $10, 10% of that is $1 (and yes, I know you can all do percentages.) So calm yourselves down. It's only a very small amount of money that he's using. THIS ISN'T A BIG DEAL.

We just HAD an update in August. The major updates are taking forever because Jader is A) busy, B) has a life besides ACC, and C) wants them to work.

10% adds up. It honestly, doesn't matter what the amount of money used as all money, as stated via the donation page, was supposed to go to the

"monthly costs"

Just because it isn't a big deal to you doesn't reflect the opinions of others. I, for one, think this is a big deal.

Jader doesn't hardly does much with the dev team. The majority of the new stuff is mainly the dev team.

"You're contradicting yourself now. If the dev team, not Jader, does the updates, then the shortage of updates is nothing to do with Jader."

We, as a dev team, do indeed do the codework on the updates.

Comment removed.

This is one of the reasons why I keep coming to this website. J-man felt the need to be more transparent about the donation process so he posted an announcement saying that ACC doesn't need our money. He could have kept quiet and bought Rock Band with our donation money, but instead he decided to tell us that there was really no risk of ACC going down due to a lack of funding. As a member of the community, I really appreciate that.

Also, Simfan, J-pops created the dev team because he knew he wouldn't be able to update the site as much. Updates are coming, albeit slowly. Not much has happened since 2007, but If you look at what the general consensus on future updates was two years ago, you'll see that what we have now is actually pretty good progress. I remember Nin10Dude once saying that he thought there would never be any more updates. That was in 2007. I think we're doing just fine.

Most non-profit owners draw a wage from their "donations". Several of you are acting like that is a bad thing. It's totally normal and expected when you donate to anything that part of the proceeds are not only used for overhead expenses but also pay wages. Just because he has another job and doesn't "need" wages, does not mean he doesn't deserve a wage for keeping this site alive.

I don't care if he totally did nothing here but pay the bills, it is giving us a place to come and enjoy the friendships that we've all gained. Let's face it, if it wasn't for getting a little income out of this site he may have shut it down years ago. Be happy ACC is here, and I for one will continue to "donate",  "tip", buy perks,  or what ever you want to call it. I love this site!