Redstate

A worthy cause, yall carry the ball full time and I appreciate you being here.
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Thou art the Great Cat, the avenger of the Gods, and the judge of words...-Inscription on the Royal Tombs at Thebes

And, Thank God, I didn't even have to answer the phone! Can't tell you how sick I am of political solicitation calls almost a year before the election, but this is a worthy cause and a respectful solicitation.

In Vino Veritas

I also made an additional donation in honor of BrooksRob, RIP. Lord knows he and I sucked up at LEAST that much bandwidth.

..."but" I want to encourage the fine folks at RS to be more tolerant of other conservatives who vary in their opinions. Don't be so eager to boot people off your site if they differ with you unless they start using bad language. Then that's understandable. More free and open discussion. Thanks.

For such an informative service, $25.00 is easy. Show us a running total, if possible.

Steve Willis
Professor of Law
University of Florida College of Law

There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life. - Frank Zappa

Talk Radio Junkie and Friend of Fred

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Develop alternatives to existing policies and keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable. Milton Friedman

I wish I had more time to contribute to the site... big time. But since I don't and therefore can't, here comes 50 Dollars US.

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"I AM WHO I AM"; and He said, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'"

For those of us who are poor college students who love this site and really want to give, but aren't necessarily financially able, why not click on 2 or 3 of Redstate's advertisers everytime you log on to the site. I'm not sure what kind of money Redstate gets through ads, but I'm sure every little bit helps.

Red State has been a well of information for me since it was first referred to me by a friend and it'd be great to return the favor.

Before you get to heaven, you must go through hell, which in my case is the People's Republic of Massachusetts.

I consider this very well spent entertainment dollars. My $100 probably averages out to about $.10 an hour for the two and 1/2 years I have spent on this site.

"I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm's way."
John Paul Jones (letter to M. Le Ray de Chaumont,16 Nov.1778)

Freedom of Religion not Freedom from Religion

Look, I've donated to RedState on at least three occasions. It was a significant amount of money each time. But when my username somehow got blocked last month, I received no explanation and no response to my numerous emails. Please respond to at least one of my emails first, then I'll consider donating. My handle was "California Conservative" before I got blocked. At least send me the email address of the person to whom I may take my grievance. Preferably someone who will respond.

Romney Republican

Good luck Erick et al. It's truly a worthy cause.

I've blogged it about it here.

I'm excited to see what you all have in store for version 3.0.

David

Sorry I can't do more right now. A running tally would be great to see the progress we're making.

I was going to donate that to McCain tomorrow, but I'll send it to you instead and cough up some more for him, though I'm soon going to be maxed I think.

John S. McCain III.

I'd be happy to kick in a Christmas gift, but I don't have a PayPal account and for me at least the link presented above doesn't work.

Is there some alternative method? I'll even be happy to put a check in the mail. (Old school. :-) ).

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Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

Done. Where's the tally? NT

Eric,

Have you looked at upgrading your server farm to be able handle more features with Drupal? Drupal offers so many features, I think it makes a great base for many applications that allow the general public to create
web content.

Drupal also has many developers working to make it better. This is something you lose with a custom application. Mysql replication allows
multiple database servers to answer queries. Web is by definition parallel allowing a cluster of servers to serve requests. Whichever direction you choose, best of luck.

Steve

Thanks for the work on the site - I really enjoy RedState and am looking forward to teh new layout.

PO Box is fine.

I send you a check. I will _NOT_ use PayPal.

Better use of the money then sending it to a politician or the RNC.

Fortuna Favet Fortibus

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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

They throw around money like a drunk Hillary contributer.

Seems to be a lot of schadenfreude about this on the intertubez, especially Naranjastan.

Between two sides of an issue lies the truth.

Wish I could send more at this time, but $25 is on the way now.

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Two thirds of the world is covered by water,
the other third is covered by Champ Bailey.

Glad to help for all you guys do.

Kathy
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Life is not fair, but It's still a Wonderful Life!

You'll be glad you did.

...please note: if we weren't pissing them off on a regular basis, people from the Other Side wouldn't be coming over here to try to scuttle our fundraising.

Put it another way: I'm not telling you to give us money. I'm just telling you that there are people who are sufficiently worried that you will that they've made the effort to try and stop you.

The Fuzzy Puppy of the VRWC. I've been usurped!

of the front page. Lets see if we can raise all the money in a very short amount of time.

"I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm's way."
John Paul Jones (letter to M. Le Ray de Chaumont,16 Nov.1778)

...from the email I recieved:

"The bad news: our liberal “friends” – you know, the ones who believe so strongly in free speech and open debate – have done what they can to prevent us from making these improvements, so that our influence will be minimized just as we head into the 2008 presidential primary season."

AND

"If we’d been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren’t really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us. We kept crashing and were out of money. We had to close down or take drastic action.

Well, we didn’t close down. We ditched Scoop and moved to the best alternative at the time, a program called Drupal. But, in accomplishing the switch, budget constraints forced us to sacrifice some popular site features in order to alleviate the strain on our overused servers."

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First off -- let me state I don't know squat about SCOOP or any of the buisiness side of websites like RS so maybe there is some key aspect of this that i am missing.

That said....

I don't mind a straight forward request for money to improve services, but blaming the liberal left for the results of your decisions seems tacky and hypocritcal. Is this not the community that believes in free market solutions? I doubt there is a vast left wing conspiracy to deny you access to SCOOP developers and there is no free speech demagoguery happening here. If the left has more developers available to them, its because they have created the market place that enables this to be so. RS should do the same, or move on.

You have made the latter decision and adopted a different business model that relies on donations. Dont' apologise for that, and especially don't blame others (isn't this what we critize the left for doing) -- just take responsibility and make it work.

-JAC

We seem to be fresh out of nutty financiers and Boys and Girls Clubs.

We The People, indeed.

It will have to wait until later this week, but this site can absolutely count on my donation of $100.

over $100: coffee mug with image of Ron Paul

over $500: throwable, shatter-proof lamp with Hillary Clinton logo

over $1000: bust of Ron Paul, autographed by the Directors, with candle holder and built in floral vase- perfect for the True Believer.

So after my earlier travails I finally got there and kicked in $100....

$25 sent

Can you post an address to which I could send you a check? I'm too scared of the internet to send you money that way.

Drupal was actually a big reason I started reading RedState on a daily basis--I used to run a Drupal site. I'll be sad to see it go but good luck with the redesign; it's always exciting and scary.

I presumed you were using a CivicSpace release of Drupal, I guess because it was a political creation (heritage from the Dean campaign). Is that correct? Thanks

god i hate paypal (stupid gun haters), but this is a good cause!!!

For answering my e-mail and I immediately hit the PayPal
account.

Ok, I just gave twenty bucks, make me a high Imperial overlord.

"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle

And while I understand that running this site isn't cheap, some of the remarks puzzle me. E.g.

The bad news: our liberal "friends" - you know, the ones who believe so strongly in free speech and open debate - have done what they can to prevent us from making these improvements, so that our influence will be minimized just as we head into the 2008 presidential primary season.

No, our Blue State buddies haven't succeeded in stopping us from improving our website. But they've made it more difficult and more expensive - which is why I'm coming to you for help.

What exactly has the left done? Run denial of service attacks? Sabotaged your hosting company? Hacked into your servers? Hid code in Scoop and Drupal which made it perform less good if hostname == redstate.com?

Yes, they every now and then sent their users over, leading to disruptive postings, but that probably was more of an administrative hassle than a server performance issue.

What did Kos & co do to stop you from running Scoop or Drupal efficiently? Did they interfere with your ability to run advertisements on redstate.com? (boycotts against companies advertising here or FEC shenanigans?) Did they lobby the authors of the free software you're using to add clauses in the licenses which penalizes right-wing sites? Blackmail?

If we’d been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren’t really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us.

IIRC, Kos hired Rusty, the original Scoop author. They seems to have solved their problems by hiring talent and paying them to fix the code issues (plus adding features) in addition to adding adequate hardware power. I have no idea how much of these fixes were included into subsequent public Scoop releases. Is that your complaint? That these fixes were only made available to left-wing blogs?

Do you have any ideas why there were no conservative Scoop people willing to help you? Aren't there any or are they just not willing to work without pay?

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In other words: I fully understand that you need to solicit contributions from the readership here, but I have troubles understanding why you had to blame the evil liberals for this. Running a high-traffic site is expensive enough even without malicious actors in the game.

Sorry for the number of questions, but these came to my mind when I got the email.

Keep up the good work. It is a real pleasure ot be part of this great community.

Those free-speech-hatin' liberals are just a bunch of fascists, just like Jonah says! This is why we can never afford to drop our guard! $100 donation to save free speech on the internet! And well worth it!

Great value to dollar I believe.

...old school guys like myself who still feel the hairs on the back of their head stand out when they leave a credit card # on the internet - so can we get a hard address so we can drop a check in the mail? DD

but I'm a Paul supporter so you banned me.

Well, [redacted] me I guess.

[One of the best decisions made in the history of this site. Wouldn't want to take from the money you were otherwise going to give to support the apologist for communist mass-murderers (that's Ron Paul) anyway. -LHW]

Your call for help is beginning to make the rounds of some geek websites, which is where I saw it.

I did a very quick check to see what software you are running and see that RedState.com is using OpenSSH version 3.9p1 (for remote log ins) and Apache httpd 2.0.59 with PHP/4.4.5 (for webserver). These are all woefully out of date and have many known and potentially exploitable security problems. I didn't probe further -- I wanted to stay well and unambiguously within the law -- and I didn't need to probe further to get a sense of the scale and nature of your maintenance problem.

I understand your need to get things taken care of. But in addition to getting the immediate problem fixed, what is more important is that some procedure is put into place to actually install security updates as they come along. You will either have to hire a geek that is kept on retainer to do that (lots of people do), find a volunteer geek who will do that (there aren't that many conservative geeks, but there are plenty of libertarian ones), or have the person who comes in to fix things train someone in your organization to keep things properly updated.

Keeping things up to date with security patches and updates is extremely important. Once you get the current mess sorted out, you must have a plan to not get in it again.

PS: Politically I am one of "the enemy" from your point of view (though I would certainly vote McCain or Guiliani over Edwards in November if that is what it came down to) so other than this advice, I will not volunteer to help. Also, I've never been involved in managing community websites before, so I can't honestly offer my services for hire.

My recommendation is that you find a geek supporter who would like to add something like this to his resume, but recognize that young supporters like that are flighty. So have someone who will stay in the organization work with the geek, and in particular make sure that this person gets suitably trained by the geek to get an overall sense of how things work and how to maintain things. In that training process, write everything down. Develop a redstate.com maintenance manual.

I hope that even though I am a political opponent you will take my advice seriously. When I see network security problems, I like to see them fixed. While I don't wish you well in your principal goals, I do believe in the market place of ideas and you shouldn't be eliminated from the marketplace for mere technical reasons.

25 bucks....hope it helps. Keep us posted on your needs. I am sure we can find some more loot.....My neighbors last name is Hsu.

2008; Its about a Commander In Chief!