Other than donations, is there anything else that can be done to help at this point?

Let me try again, then.

Please re-read the first paragraph in Chogon's initial post again, as it explains precisely what the miscommunication was, which is:

TPTB have been answering the question with monthly donations + reserves in mind (what they had come to think CAVCON was tracking), instead of just considering monthly donations (what I actually intended CAVCON to be tracking).

And since his post explains what the miscommunication was, logically, how it happened was likely to have already been sorted out by the time he posted (especially given the understandable nature of what the miscommunication was, which he explained), so further inquiry (inquiries made after his post) would be pointless. [emphasis mine] seems to imply Chogon's explanation about the miscommunication wasn't good enough, which we take to mean that you're really looking for an inquiry as to whom this should be blamed on, since that's the main piece of information missing from his explanation.

As for conspiracies: I would love to not expect accusations of conspiracies when these kinds of things happen, but I have roughly a decade of Uru experience starting from the first explorer flood in beta to the shutdown by Ubi to gameTap to when the MOULa login turnstile was broken and many, many others in between that clearly suggest otherwise. Our explanations, no matter how accurate, have never been sufficient to squelch the accusations. Such is life. And your request for further inquiry (after the explanation had been provided) certainly seemed to be another example of same.

Yes, Please. I do not know what exactly we'd lose with "degraded service" if it were to come to that but it doesn't sound good.

there are a number of pretty easy ones that would make a lot of difference..

Still, "blame it on aliens" isn't something you tell to your fans considering the previously cited posts. Especially when they're the ones donating to keep the game online. While we might be directing those remarks at to someone who hasn't donated, the others who do donate are also watching ;)

[As for what I was thinking of to work on in MOULa - hmmm, there is a *lot* to chose from. But mostly the fixes that have come forward from fans - there are a number of pretty easy ones that would make a lot of difference. But that would require setting up a beta server and a beta, etc. which cost money.

Hope that helps,
Chogon

Of course, the Maintainer's Guild is just one suggestion. It could instead be hosted directly on OpenUru or wherever Cyan feels is best for them. After all, the point is to get this on Cyan's servers in the end.

Columbo impression:
Oh, just one more thing.

The second phase I will be asking for volunteers from fans to host file servers to spread out the data transfer costs (more details on that later).

Thanks!
Chogon

Though we'd naturally prefer to get some reports from MOSS shards, that doesn't exclude DirtSand, but the test client build should come from the CWE-ou repo even though it will lag behind the h'uru client until we can catch up. Anyone who can, or has, set up a shard could do testing and report the results. The Guild of Maintainers is an excellent idea. We'll see how it works out. More when we have the details.