As I figured, all the papers I have due for college and whatnot take up too much of my time to do much programming related stuff. My main focus now in relation to that is to edit the code for my Team Fortress 2 gaming server to offer donator benefits, to give people an incentive to donate $3 a month. It costs me around $30 a month to host the server, and it's been starting to get really popular. It started out with only two to five people going on it for an hour a day, but now I see a daily 16 people out of three 32 player limit. If I can get at least ten people to donate, the server pays for itself basically.
The work involved with setting this up, aside from just coding everything or finding code for the changes, is to test the server and whether or not all my client-side modifications can work together or if some may conflict with each other and not work. There might be other problems that can only be seen after a long time. For example, I learned that I can't just leave my server on the same map for people to play on, without massive lag accumulating after a few hours. I resolved this by adding a script that simply refreshes the map every four hours, as my server is a 24/7 gaming one. It's all a lot of work to set up and particularly, I'm not sure how to set up Paypal with my website to allow people to donate. I have a verified Paypal, but I'd need a way to record people's player identifications so I can update people's donation statuses. Some people are crafty enough to make bots that can do it all automatically but I know I'll have to at least edit the databases myself to add people to the donation list.
