GRCRT was created and developed with passion. By gamers, for gamers, and over the 13 years of its existence, it has gathered around itself quite a large community of regular users: currently about 10,000 per month (and at its peak even 21,000) from 126 countries around the world.
Unfortunately, the hard truth is that passion alone is not enough. When we gave up displaying ads a few years ago, we switched to a donation model. GRCRT has therefore relied solely on your generosity and goodwill. It was your contributions that kept the servers running, enabling us to provide the tools that many of you can't imagine playing without. Recently, however, the reality of financial constraints has become impossible to ignore. Year after year, the amount of donations decreased, often not sufficing, forcing us to contribute from our own pockets. This year, that aid has dropped dramatically, covering about 55% of the necessary €2040 needed to maintain our infrastructure. Unfortunately, we can no longer afford to bear such high costs, so we are sad to announce that at the end of this year, the GRCRT project is going to be closed in its entirety. Definitely.
What does this closure mean in practice? GRCRT is not only a script: it's also statistics, activity monitor, image version of the report (for sharing where the standard report doesn't work) and graphic elements on converted reports. And since players come from all corners of the world, GRCRT should be equally (quickly) accessible to each of them, regardless of location (we even have players from Antarctica). In order to be able to ensure proper operation of these functionalities, a proper infrastructure is needed:
- to read / write the data fast we use a powerful dedicated server with SSD drives
- to secure your reports and statistics in case of a failure we have a second server with backups
- a service called CDN is responsible for fast access to data from anywhere in the world
This is an extremely difficult decision and having to say goodbye - after so many years - to a project that for many of us has become an indispensable and integral part of the game is hard to accept.
To each and every one of you who has been a part of this multi-year journey, we would like to express our deepest gratitude and appreciation. Your support, whether through financial contributions, bug reports, or simply playing or talking together, has made an immeasurable difference.
In particular, however, we would like to thank the group of 17 most dedicated users who have supported us on a regular, monthly (and some more often) basis. Forgive us if, due to GDPR, we do not disclose your names.
Thank you for being with us all these years.
Thank you for supporting us.
We are sorry that we have to part ways.
Farewell....
Potusek
anpu
p.s. If anyone would like to take over and continue GRCRT and is interested in buying back the site, domain and services, feel free to contact us: potusek@grcrt.net
