Launch of sponsorship program & merchandise

[Syzop]

Today we are officially launching the sponsorship program and our merchanise shop. Although UnrealIRCd is a free program, we do put a great deal of time, effort, and money into keeping UnrealIRCd alive. Running the related services, like Central Blocklist, costs money too. If you like UnrealIRCd and want to support us then please consider making a donation or buy yourself something nice from the shop.

Sponsorship & Donations
As we have monthly costs, we have now started a monthly sponsorship program. It comes in 6 flavors, starting with Iron (5 EUR/month) and Bronze (10 EUR/month). It is still possible to also do single/one-off donations. You can sponsor via PayPal or Patreon. See the donations page for more information.
At the moment we don't have special privileges or perks for the monthly sponsors. Most of the people we spoke who are considering sponsorship told us that they basically just want to help out. We are working on badges, and of course you will be listed on the donations page (if you want). If you are a monthly sponsor and have any further suggestions, let us know!

Merchandise shop
Thanks to help from Valware there's now an UnrealIRCd merchandise shop. While we don't expect to make a big profit from the shop, it is still a fun way to have both a nice fan-item and support us with a small profit on each item sold. Mugs, caps, t-shirts, it's all there. Note that if you order from outside the EU then shipping fees may be quite high and customs may charge you an extra fee.

Costs
To give you a rough idea: the hosting costs of all our services are about 175 EUR/month. That's for 2 IRC servers, 1 main webserver with lots of subdomains (main site, wiki, bug tracker, forums, modules), 1 dedicated powerful Central Blocklist server and 2 very small admin/internal sites. As our sites are DDoS'ed on a regular basis, we use stable and secure cloud servers and we have CloudFlare in front. The complete thread in where we talked about costs and sponsorship is here. Thanks to everyone who posted tips and suggestions there.

You can support without donating
Last but not least: you can support UnrealIRCd in many ways. You can report bugs, help with testing release candidates, update the documentation, help people in the support channel or on the forums, etc. If you can't spare the money or don't want to donate, that is fine too. UnrealIRCd will always be free.

[Syzop]

Someone pointed out that the Merch shop country selection was rather limited. This has now been fixed.

Within the EU orders are bearable with regards to shipping fees and there are no customs or other extra costs involved. For people outside the EU, the shipping costs are higher (not much we can do about that) and you may need to pay an extra customs bill (import, etc). That latter cost is not included in the calculation.

[CrazyCat]

Seen https://shop.unrealircd.org/products/desk-mouse-pad-1, tested ./unrealircd coffee... And had a look to https://github.com/unrealircd/unrealircd/pull/274

I love that !