I finally received an invoice from my webmaster in regard to the work he's done on Caste Football over the past year. To retrace some history first, CF has been around since 2004. For a long time it had a homepage with lots and lots of articles and updates, in addition to the forum. I paid two or three times to have the site redesigned and modernized, but each time hackers and spammers sooner or later managed to take advantage of security loopholes and wrecked them.
As result, eventually CF became a forum only using V-Bulletin software. But that too became overrun with hackers and spammers and had to be repaired several times.
In January 2016 the forum changed over to XenForo software, and that has worked very well ever since. However, the hosting companies I used since that switchover left a lot to be desired to put it mildly, and until about a year ago it was an endless routine of CF often running slow, very slow, or off-line altogether and then me having to send emails back and forth to alleged "technicians" in India who could never get it right (though always informing me the problem was fixed when of course it was at best a very temporary fix).
So those of you who have been around these parts a long time know what a long and frustrating struggle it's been. But the webmaster I'm using now did a lot of work beginning last August, moving CF off the server it was on to a far better setup , updating the XenForo software after over six years of use, along with a lot of other tasks big and small to clean up and fix the many issues that had been occurring.
And ever since those upgrades and changes the site runs great, downloads darn near instantly, doesn't go offline, and doesn't have any other glitches or problems I'm aware of, and I anticipate it will stay that way under the current setup.
I have asked for donations at times during all these years as some of the fixes following hacks were expensive, but I always paid for most of the costs myself, from the original design to the new designs to the change to a forum only, etc. Although there's been a donation button on the site for over a year, I haven't made a pitch for help since we switched to XenForo over seven years ago other than pointing out that the Donation button had been added.
But I'm now requesting help to pay off this invoice. It's a little under $700, $689.31 to be exact, and I'm not in a position to just eat that kind of expenditure, at least not unless I have to. Caste Football is a free site, but nothing is truly free, especially if it's something good trying to exist in Joe Biden's America. The posters and lurkers here are volunteers, but so am I, I've put a lot of time and effort into this one of a kind forum over the past nearly 20 years and have put a lot of fiat bucks into it as well. So please help out and click the Donate button and send the most generous donation you can.
