Introduction
Hello everyone,My financial situation continues to tank. And despite filing hundreds of job applications over the course of the last few months, I have not received any job offers.
Just now, I had to make a payment of over $500. For some of you, this may not seem like much. For me, this was almost all the finances I had available.
It is now necessary for me to make some emergency changes to Composr. Up to this point, I continued to work on Composr in my spare time, mostly without funding. I cannot afford to do that anymore.
Paid development only
Effective immediately, I cannot provide any development for Composr anymore without financial backing. Composr is not paying my bills. And I am about to run into a situation where I cannot pay my bills anymore if I don't make drastic changes. I cannot provide any more volunteer Composr development. The only development I can do is work that I am being contracted (paid) to do.Please consider hiring me to work on your site or to work on Composr if you would like me to continue maintaining Composr. Again, I cannot do it for free anymore.
Version 11 dev1762987915
I will be speed-running a new release of Composr that you can install and test. Normally, I would run Composr through the testing suite before release. But that takes a lot of time. And I cannot afford that in my current situation. Therefore, this will be an unofficial release of Composr dubbed "11 dev1762987915". Do not attempt to upgrade existing sites to this version; you will likely break them. The upgrade script is designed not to allow upgrades to "dev" versions. And this version will not be listed on the download page or in your Admin Zone (instead, I'll post a download link on a new news article).I was working on the following things, and I will be ceasing development of these things unless someone can hire me to finish them:
- A new issue tracker for this site (unfortunately, this means we will not have a working issue tracker for the indefinite future)
- The Bayes antispam detection
- Any bugs in Composr that I have not yet fixed, including the cookie login and session bugs that multiple people have brought to my attention
After version 11 dev1762987915
After version 11 dev1762987915, the fate of Composr is in the hands of the community (or whether someone finally hires me full-time). I will be stalling the development of Composr unless people can fund me to continue, or unless other developers can hop on board the project and continue where I left off.Composr.app
Unfortunately, the fate of this website is also up in the air. The development contract between Chris and me expired (I haven't heard anything from him since I informed him a month ago that it was about to expire). Normally, I would be charging Chris $20/month to host the site (my standard hosting rate). However, I have been hosting it out of my will for free. I cannot afford to do that anymore either. And since our contract expired, I cannot obligate Chris to help cover the hosting costs of composr.app.Therefore, there is a very real risk that I will need to shut this site down in the coming couple of months unless someone else can help contribute to the hosting costs or is willing to host the site instead of me.
Conclusion
I sincerely apologize to the community for doing this and for turning greedy. And I thank everyone for your understanding. This is not something I wanted to do. But it is something I have to do. I am disrespecting myself by continuing to work on this project without any financial compensation to help pay my bills. And if I continue down this path, then I will lose everything I have and probably end up in debt. I need to focus my time on what will get me income and pay my bills.If anyone in the community is willing to help with anything I mentioned above, please leave a comment on this article or send me a private message. I would greatly appreciate that.
Please do not yet take this news article as an official "Composr is doomed and will be shut down". Please help me help you, and I can continue keeping Composr alive.
Comments
Nothing is official. But we are working the logistics out.
However, the ability to monitor (subscribe for notifications) individual issues and the ability to sponsor issues with points will not immediately be available. Development of those features will remain postponed.
Also, a new page is now up:
https://composr.app/purchase.htm
You can use your points to purchase things. You can donate to me to continue developing Composr, and you will receive points. More things will be added over time.
https://composr.app/fo…/potential-challenges.htm
I wish I could help you financially. But I'm living in a rented spare bedroom myself. I don't think the amount I'd realistically be able to pay you would help you. (My Composr site is for my side business, and my side business isn't making enough money that it'd be able to sustain me as a full-time or even part-time employee, let alone you.) It's really probably best for you to stop working on Composr until you can find a day job. And it really seems like you should be able to, since you seem to be a perfectly effective developer. (I've just sent you a LinkedIn connection request, just in case I come across anything that looks like it could fit. I'd certainly let you know if my own day-job company has an opening on our web team. One other thing— the resume links on your personal website seem to be broken right now.)
I'd be willing to attempt to help with hosting the Composr website/forums if that's not something you'll be able to do anymore. I'd need to discuss the load and resource requirements that you've seen to determine if I could do it or not. (I'm able to host my own website on Composr with what I believe to be a similar number of users, so it seems like I should be able to, but I'm not entirely sure since it sounds like you've got a more complex setup for the homesite.)
Yes. However, I experienced the bug on about 30-50% of my attempts at creating bug notes. That is a significantly high error rate. And every time, I lose what I type (Mantis does not have auto-save like Composr does). I can disable the form security token feature (and I considered this), but that opens up Mantis to CSRF attacks, where an attacker can trick you into submitting sensitive information publicly on the bug tracker. It is not a risk that I want to take (not having form tokens is a big no-no in modern security).
That's understandable. We are in hard economic times. I appreciate the thoughts.
Thank you. I accepted.
Funny, I noticed that yesterday, before I had the chance to read your full reply here. I fixed it. All of my Nextcloud share links have changed since I did the operating system upgrade at the beginning of the month.
I appreciate it. And I will keep that in mind. The site currently only sits at < 100 GB (I do not know the exact number at this time). I have a script that automatically cleans up old generated upgrade files after 30 days. And that helps a lot with keeping the total size of the site down. The two big concerns would be the following:
The good news, however, is that aside from the site running off of a git branch, it does not need any special software. It runs just like any other Composr site.