When you read posts on DJF, you'll notice an announcement for the DJF Summer Funding Drive 2023. This is to fundraise for hosting costs, HTTPS enactment costs, and vBulletin upgrade costs.

Hosting costs are ~$500 annually. We traditionally use the VIP/Vendor income to cover this. Since COVID put a halt to DJ activities, there really hasn't been many VIP/Vendor subscriptions. As a result, Dix and I have been directly paying these costs out of pocket. Obviously, we want to share this burden.

HTTPS needs to be implemented on DJF. We have a quote from the hosting service for ~$1000 to do this work. We won't do this until this activity is funded... which is why it hasn't been done yet.

As part of the HTTPS deployment, vBulletin may need to be upgraded. We don't expect to undergo a serious upgrade, but recognize that deploying HTTPS may intentionally cause an upgrade of vBulletin. This work is included in the HTTPS quote.

So there are the details behind the funding drive. If you have any questions, please post below.