Sheep v2.7 Education/Registration/Donation plan
So as you might guess, running and developing the Electric Sheep
network is a costly endeavor. Rewarding for sure, but the bottom line
includes server hardware, bandwidth bills, and engineering time. One
of the objectives of the upcoming version 2.7 is to let more people
know how the Electric Sheep works, and how they can help it continue
to work, by registration, and donation.
I plan to continue to offer this service for free to the public.
These days there are 50,000 daily users, but mostly I have no idea who
they are, and vice versa. Below I outline the plan to address this.
Your feedback is welcome.
1) during the installation process, add an optional registration and
donation step, maybe just by popping up a web browser on a server page
with the information and forms. We call this "page X" below.
2) if they decline to register when they install, they may run the
client anonymously then they:
a) download sheep from the lowest http bandwidth category (maybe
from CoralCDN, ie the current system), except the first 4 sheep
which come from a fast server.
b) periodic on-screen text on the bottom of the screen: "see
http://electricsheep.org or press 'y' to join and receive more sheep
free and faster". Pressing 'y' exits the screen-saver and brings up
a browser with page X loaded. Other key/mouse events just exit to
the desktop like normal.
c) In the config dialog there's an "about" button to pop up page X.
3) After they register on page X of the drupal:
a) part of registration is asking for donation.
b) after the email address is confirmed, their client will download
from a larger bandwidth category (from dvlabs.com our corporate
sponsor).
c) opt-out bimonthly newsletter consisting of your rendering stats
(how many frames your computer submitted), best recent sheep, random
news, reminder to donate. can roll this out slowly.
Honesty the best policy
Everything u have said spot makes incredible sense but here is how I feel.
U probably deserve to get paid for all of your time and hard work and at least it shouldn't cost u anything out of your own pocket ,but, I am not going to pay for a screen saver, plain and simple. You can use my cpu cycles to render frames for your own profit if you like (not saying your trying to turn a profit here, maybe your trying to avoid a loss) including the hi-res sheep which I do not access b/c I don't pay for them.
Registration is an interesting idea. I suppose that people may actually take things more seriously if they had to. Of course having the person read directions off a web page to set up the client and actually put the address of the central server in themselves, may help just as much in terms of education. Can I register anonymously or would this whole system of removal of the scroller be tied to my ip which is dynamic.
This statement "periodic on-screen text on the bottom of the screen: "see
http://electricsheep.org or press 'y' to join and receive more sheep
free and faster" seems like it would require some kind of tracking on your part.
If I don't use the coral server which I don't(I realize this is not an option for some) would I be affected in terms of not registering. I will probably avoid registration if I can but I certainly don't want the nag. I guess I will have to make a decision eventually.
I am sort of wondering what implications these new policies may have on distribution of the client in the various linux distros, if there is in fact any.
Lastly I guess in terms of bandwidth reduction although it would require more time to implement why not extend the bittorent distribution system to be trackerless.Eg.
BitTorrent Distributed Hash Table (DHT) or Trackerless BitTorrents
I realize I sound like a jerk but this is how I feel
Hi testing, thanks for your
Hi testing, thanks for your feedback. Let me fill in a few more details about the issues you raise, and maybe you can clarify yourself too.
I'm glad you run the current screensaver and contribute your CPU to the collective. You said you wouldn't pay and that's fine because I also said "I plan to continue to offer this service for free to the public." so you are not going to be excluded. I may eventually have more "for pay" options than I do now (ie the HiFiDreams), including one that's a subscription, but there are no plans on removing the free option. Would it bother you if there were an option to pay for an improved experience?
The registration that I am talking about is free, just like the registration for this web forum. In fact these systems will be identical, as I plan on using Drupal to manage the user community. I am not planning on making anyone read directions or copy a server address, I want the whole thing to be as automatic and simple as possible, but I do want to more clearly inform people how this thing works, and invite them to make a donation.
Registration would (like now) not be anonymous, as you have to provide a working email address to create the account. It's not tied to an IP address, you can use it from anywhere. What you would have to do is enter your account name and password into the screensaver configuration/settings window (or provide this information during installation). So "tracking" is not used or required.
The Coral server is completely transparent. If you currently use the screensaver, you are already using it. I plan on continuing this practice.
You mention if this would impact distribution as part of Linux. I have studied the Debian Free Software Guidelines and I don't see any conflict between them and these plans. If anyone does, please let me know!
Finally, I don't see how using a DHT would help since we have a tracker. The problem is people who are blocked because their firewall has not been configured to allow bittorrent through, and people who are blocked by their ISP.
Thanks for being candid.
No crawler during screensaver please :O
I think actually if you had text being displayed while the screensaver is running, it would kind of discourage me from donating because it's so annoying. :/
But the registration-prompt is definitely a good idea because it takes almost no time, and the people who are under 18 (and can't donate) can still get all the cool features.
I also support the periodic release of choice HD sheep to the supporters, and it would be a really good incentive to donate. [Long live the sheep!]
well all you would have to
a lot of people install software without reading any of the documentation or click-throughs. this is a way of letting those people know what the software is, and that it is really an internet service rather than a stand-alone screen-saver. right now there are a lot of electric sheep users that have no idea that it contacts a server and that it costs me money to run.
finally, in order to remove the crawling text all you have to do is register, which is free. given all that, do you still think this feature would really discourage you from donating?
All that considered...
Oops, I definitely misread about that then; so registering would get rid of the crawler. Then I would have to agree that it would be for the benefit of the ESheep community by power of knowledge. I was thinking of the kind of feeling you get watching a preacher on TV who asks so much for donations that it discourages you from donating. Do you think that it may be more effective to ask for donations after the first run (only if they registered while installing and before running) because users may not know what to expect before they run ESheep, but be inspired after they see it (who couldn't be?).
P.S. I was looking through the specific maths used to make sheep and it gave me a sense of how much you have to know before you can form them to what you want them to look like, so my appreciation to the breeders! Also, do you think there will be a possibility of an add-on or mod being produced for Apophyisis that will use all of the correct formats that ESheep needs, so we will not have to manually edit the code to make it work? I know there was a feature that set a few parameters, but it seemed like it was a small portion of what needed to be done to make a flame ESheep-ready.
AWS
Have you ever considered leveraging Amazon's Web Services for some of the electricsheep?
(Although I don't know how this would fly with dvlabs.)
You can price out what it might cost here: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html?
For example running a small server 24/7 would cost 72/month. But that doesn't include bandwidth/storage, so I don't really know how that compares to what it costs currently.
Overall I think registration seems like a small effort and should be tolerated by most consumers of the sheep.
I second the comments regarding paying for access to some HD sheep & a bittorrent tracker
dce
some questions
Hallo.
I think, the users can make a money-contribution for
the nice sheeps. I think, you have much Server-costs.
I read here in the forum that the new SheepV2.7b2 for Linux
is in higher resolution (800x600).
Is the new sheep,you write about here, in higher resolution too?
In the statistic of the sheepserver i can see that are
unique clients = 274 . You write that per day are 50000 users.
I don't understand this correlation. Can you explain this?
How we can pay? Per Creditcard or better per Paypal or... ?
Out of america not all people have creditcards.
Greetings
Selle
I really like the idea of
I really like the idea of the first sheep getting downloaded fast, I think many people don't realize how long it takes to download one set of sheep so they think it is broken and don't use it. I am really excited for v2.7! even though it will probably result in even more time staring at the screen for unmentioned periods of time. If you do end up asking for donations it may be useful to put something on the front page of electricsheep.org that says something like server costs $ ##/month, costs covered until month/year. This way people will actually see where the money is going and see more often that their favorite screen saver needs to be funded.
Optional bittorrent tracker
As secondary adopters of your ES project, we would like to see the option in the client to change the bittorrent parameters... so that the users that want HD sheep for free can use just the same client and change some settings, and not have to install and configure an RSS-reading bittorrent client to get the sheep.
Is this possible to implement? We would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks,
John
admin@denaje.gotdns.com
Want High-Definition Electric Sheep?
Denaje's Sheep Server
good ideas
These are cool ideas.... Ive been in support of some kind of relatively inexpensive subscriber based system for a while. What I thought would be cool as well is some kind of subscription that enables access to periodically released high-definition sheep... not all of them at once necessarily... just kind of roll them out like majestic presents... because i really love the high-definition but like most people wont ever be able to afford a plasma screen and computer and all that. It'd be a nice additional incentive!
Danny
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