FMC wiki support
Why we are kindly asking for your support ...
After five years ..
The Free Man Creator wiki initiative went online in March 2020, and for five years now I have paid for and supported this resource myself.
However both hosting and technical support costs have increased, and I am now asking for your help.
During these first five years, we have not just developed the contents, but - thanks to our technical support person - we also made sure to have technical maintenance updates to stay on the most recent secure and stable versions of the software used, and set up a system of daily backups. The technical support work included fighting off attacks by bots and hackers who tried made the site unavailable on multiple occasions, in fact just now again in May 2025.
Furthermore user functionality has been enhanced with downloads, user logon, structured discussions forum, and the use of SemanticMediaWiki extending standard MediaWiki software. So in five years, the complexity of the site has increased, to your benefit, but it also causes an increase in technical support costs.
Many thousands of users from over 170 countries worldwide now access the site 24x7, and we have received very kind and positive feedback. And whereas people obviously use the site for ad hoc searches, many people also use the FMC wiki for hours and hours of study, and some people come back dozens to hundreds of times.
For a better future
However, the more work is invested in the site and the more it gets used, the more annoying become the service disruptions with the current hosting provider, which have occurred all too often over the last 12 months. Furthermore, meanwhile also the complexity of the site has increased, causing an increase in technical support costs.
Therefore we are now offering the ability for you to support the Free Man Creator wiki initiative financially. The collected funds will be used to strengthen the technical infrastructure and increase service availability. Specific plans are:
- better online service: move to another hosting provider, possibly also from the current virtual machine to a dedicated server
- redundancy: set up a link with rsarchive to have an asynch backup copy hosted in the US, in case something would happen to the European site
- warrant future: put in place a process for disaster recovery and succession planning (also in case something would happen to key people)
In summary
We want to ensure that the FMC wiki remains online with better service, and that this resource does not risk getting lost.
For this we have now enabled this new donations page. We commit to providing transparency and updates on the best use of the funds, which will be used solely and strictly to cover the technical infrastructure and service costs (hosting and support).
Thank you very much in advance for your support!
Kind regards,
Derek or Dirk
