Yup, I'm in. Aria.

$120.00 for 9 years? Is that for a year, a month or all of the 9 years?

I'm in regardless....

No job at the moment. Will let you know when I come into some money. No way we can let Rocco's hard work and love and dedication slip through our fingers.

Count me in.

are we able to set up like a justgiving page to do it through? or possibly even a donation button on the site? we would then be able to continue raising money to keep the site going over time :) but i definitely dont mind chipping in a fiver to keep the site going

danihatesyou

PepperJ

You’re all very kind. 😊

I’ll see what I can do to get a donate button added soon! I’ve been more pre occupied with more important features and making the site a more pleasant experience (like fixing that silly link preview) but a donate button should be pretty quick and easy. I’ll toss it up tonight after work!

Thank you everyone. 🙏

✿CherryBomb✿

Red1263 o7

I'm in. Just have to figure out how get the funds transferred and to who. Is it possible to get more than 10 yrs?

if you are in you have to type only your screename

Keep in mind- this is just the domain name.

Generally costs for the domain do not change much over time, and if/when they do it’s because of the cost of the general economy of domains, not because the site is or isn’t popular.

The name is locked to me, and won’t be released until the paid years are gone and I fail to renew it. (Unlikely, because they really spam you if something goes wrong.)

The benefit to paying in advance is that the rate is now locked so the prices won’t change. Even 10 years down the line though, nobody else can scoop the domain out from under us without us actually unlocking it and giving it to them.

The other benefit is if something were to happen to me. (Hit by a bus or something) nothing would cause the the domain to go away. (The server wouldn’t be protected by that, unfortunately.)

maybe you could make a go fund me page where we could donate

what if you got hit by a spaceship in a tornado during an earthquake in the middle of a sunami?

As long as none of those happen to hit the server in Ohio, I think we’re good. 😄

But luckily the domain is pretty safe, even from all of those!
If something did cause the domain itself to break, I think this site (or the internet in general) should be the least of the worries...

I'm in, how do I donate?

Donations are open. :)
http://help-qa.com/donate

Donating $10 for now! I'll help out with more next week. I'd have given more, but I have a convention to go to this weekend, and I love you guys, but a photo with Stan Lee comes first. 😎

I can't believe it's back! My heart feels weird.

Yes, and I do not apologize for it either! Which is rather rare for me.

Seriously though, just a photo is costing me $150, when usual con prices are around the $60-$80 mark. I've saved for three months even before it was announced he was coming, but I go to at least two each year - it's just that someone actually worth spending that kind of money on rarely steps foot into my crappy city. Lol.

I agree with the sentiment but why buy 9 years in advance? What if help.com becomes available? Or more likely something like help.qa

Money might be better spent on modernizing the website? (while retaining the retro look of course)

I have a lot of domains including my personal site under my own name, which I will keep forever, but I still pay yearly because, well, why not

Oh no no no! I didn't mean to assume you were!

Sorry, perhaps my humor does not come across well. I did not mean to imply or assume that my donation was something to gripe about. Not at all. :) In fact, I feel pretty damn pathetic that I have almost $300, but I cannot part with it for anything else other than this weekend. :( Like I am not doing enough.

Yay for the donation button! Im at student so cant afford much but ive put a fiver in for now :) never heard of the stripe payment people before i was expecting paypal or sage xD

i didnt mean to anon that xD whoopsy

I want to hug you. Can I please hug you? Virtually of course, and consent is absolutely voluntary!

Both you and Rockster, of course. Lol.

Odd actually, I've always onserved that Dani gives hugs to anyone except me. :P On a count of she think I'm someone who lives in America...somehow.

observed **

No worries! And PayPal isn't good. They've been known to freeze funds and are all sorts of sketchy. I've had too many issues with them in the past. Stripe is relatively new, but they work excellently. Never heard of Sage though! There are so many options. 😄

Big thank you to those who donated! And like @soco said- all of the money goes back into the site. If you guys want to put it into pre-paying for the domain, then I'm happy to comply. 😉

@_fourthings_ (Need to fix tagging usernames that have markdown in them) - I don't think .qa is an existing/supported TLD, at least right now. And if Help.com ever comes back available, it's doubtful it will be available for anything less than $10k.
As far as modernizing the site- that's all going to be on me. If you've got any specific features/requests, please send them my way. 😄 I think if there is ever any site-changing feature requested, I'll do a poll on whether or not to implement it. Or we can do the same for choosing which request comes next.

How do I donate?

I just want to say, I'm jealous of you ferrying a pic with Stan Lee!

Just put in my $10 for the cause

http://help-qa.com/donate

I've got it Vampy, thanks.😊

I have one request specifically; PRIVATE MESSAGES! Lol. How that never even occurred to the original site Admins, I'll never know.

I actually believe that was intentional! They wanted all communication on Help to be public. I think this was to attempt to prevent bullying or any other negativity that's made possible when messages aren't seen by other people.
That said- we can always add it! Maybe private messages would only be possible if you're friends with the user? That way you could easily prevent a user messaging you by removing them as a friend.

That works, yes! I only suggested it because sometimes there are just things that some people may not be willing to share so publicly. Some things are rather sensitive, you know? I know I've run into a few of those realizations myself.

donated 20 dollars

🙇 Thank you all!

I missed the part on how you donate

How long do you have to pay the 9 year fee?

If you could wait til after the holidays, that might be a better time...??

That sounds like a plan. I can definitely give more after Christmas.

How much are you short as of now?

Well, don't talk about who gave what under any circumstance. Just about the goal and how close we are to that....

.qa is a Qatar regional domain which is available to the public.

I suppose my point is, as long as you own the domain nobody can take it away from you, so it's not needed to buy 9 years in advance. You can just let it automatically renew each year and the only way ownership could change hands is if the owner of help.qa gives it to someone else.

*help-qa.com

Edit comment feature would be cool

The documentation you need to send to register a .qa? Same as any country really, as long as you're not government or military it's pretty straightforward, a small letter of your intent and proof of a registered business name if you intend to do business. If you do intend to do business you might need proof of some connection to the country in question, but that rarely happens

@_fourthings_ looks like you're correct! I did a very basic search for available domains and it didn't pop up. help.qa would be sweet, but like @soco said, we'd lose some SEO points.

As it is, our SEO set up is fairly decent. It should be getting picked up, we're mobile-optimized, and we comply to all or most of the industry standards. That said- the most important part of SEO is usage. Many things are taken in to account - how long a user spends on the site, how long a user spends on each page, how many different pages the user visits, repeat users (we've got that one nailed down pretty well. 😄), and, of course, how many users there are.

Because of how new we are, and how few users we have- we're not going to show up on any search engine list any time soon. That will change with time- SEO takes length of time the site as been up into account.

Help.com is the ideal domain because it's so easy and it's something people will tend to type in. Hopefully we can start to get picked up so that we can have an influx of traffic. 😄

Donated.

Jay and I have already donated as well.

I need to wait until mid december, i hope thats ok, im running too low right now

There's no rush at all. 😊 The domain is locked until next year at the earliest. Even after that, it's unlikely the price the will change.

Thank you all again for your kind donations. I'll do my best to not disappoint with the future of this site. 😄

how much more is needed, I haven't yet donated been busy with work

Haven't had anything since the first wave. 😛 We didn't quite hit it, but we're pretty close. I plan to do it once the season closes up regardless of amount donated though. Just gotta make it through all of the Christmas stuff first. 😉

Yes, it will