Hello folks,

This month was a very expensive for userscripts.org - instead of the normal couple of hundred dollar server; we paid for 3 servers (ending up costing $500 more than normal due to faulty hardware and bad timing).

The good news is that the new server is MUCH faster, and has 3 times as much ram, and ISN'T crashing :) -- I'd really like a couple weeks of my life back dealing with those issues...

If you are a geek you can always check out munin - before the upgrade we would start swapping after a few days of running the app servers.

Ads - I've tweaked the ads a bunch. First I made it so that if you are logged in then you don't see them at all :) Secondly, I added adbrite which lets anyone sign up for a text link - this is an experiment. Third, I tweaked the colors of the google ads a bit.

I've not yet, but I will put a nice labeled div around all the ads, so if you want to greasemonkey/userstyle them out of existence even if you aren't logged in, then you can - of course I figured if you really care, you would be using ad-block anyway ;)

Please let me know if any of this is offensive, we've been keeping the ads as far out of the way as we can (heck, google even emailed us saying we should be making MUCH more if we put and ad on the top, but blended them in... but we look at the ads as a way to pay for the service, not to make a living)

Adblock Plus users can add this site to whitelist by adding @@userscripts.org to filter rule.

You might consider setting up a paypal account, and then putting a "Donate" link somewhere on the site, so people could donate with paypal to help with server costs. You could even surround that link, too, with <div> tags for people who don't want to see that either. :)
Regards,
-Max

I think you should just put ads on the site, even for logged in users. Personally I won't mind if it was helping with the cost, and you could keep what was ever left over for all your hard work. People could just use a userscript to remove them if they really wanted to like you said.

I agree that a donation box seems like a good way to go. I mean, scriptwrites tend to be programmers, and programmers tend to be generous to causes they are fond of. I know I am.

i wonder if anyone else has noticed, the site downloadtube dot come has been copying the content of userscripts.org and running ads on their site, thus effectively robbing userscripts of revenue to pay for their servers, and also illegally hosting the scripts of the sites users. not only that but it also removes paypal links from the scripts descriptions, thereby robbing script authors of any potential donations.

ive written to the site owner to get him to remove my scripts, but he claims that the users of his site have submitted the content, and its nothing to do with him, and that its really difficult for him to remove any scripts from his site once they have "been submitted" where in fact it looks like he has just written a script to scrape the userscripts.org site

oops should have written "downloadtube dot com"

hmmm just downloaded some of the scraped scripts from the downloadtube.com site (that originate on userscripts.org), and it appears each script has the following bit of code pasted in at the start.

-------------------
flickrQuoter-
By haas (editor.downloadtube@gmail.com) based on code from Downloadtube.com
For full source code, 100's more DHTML scripts, and Terms Of Use,
visit http://www.downloadtube.com
-------------------

the script name is obviously different in each case, but the "By " part is different for each script, most probably a random name generator is utilised. the other interesting thing to note is that all the GreaseMonkey metadata at the start of the script is stripped out, making the scripts pretty useless anyway. the site just seems like a adsense money making scheme.