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This is gonna be a fairly serious announcement, a sort of confession if you will. I just urge you to please read over the entire announcement before coming to any conclusions on the matter. You see, up until this point I've had next to nothing come in through donations. However, lately more donations have been coming in - coincidentally right as I happen to get a job that itself brings in money. What I haven't given much thought to is how you guys would feel about what those funds went to. Up until now, funds have been immediately transferred to my personal bank account - the same one that our new dedicated server will be renewed from. I treated donation money as just, my money. I gave little consideration to ensuring that those funds went to things like server renewals and other such things - as ultimately, I knew I'd be able to afford them regardless. And ultimately the donations that come in don't begin to cover the majority of CU's overall costs. Considering all of this, I saw it as no issue to use donation funds on whatever I pleased - as long as I made sure that the bills got paid. Apparently, however, some of my own staff wasn't aware of this - including our own administration. Hearing me mention that I bought something non-CU related with (probably) donation money nonchalantly in voice resulted in one particular admin having quite the shock and negative response, along with another member of the team. I honestly couldn't tell you what specific dollars went to where, because again - when it comes in, it just becomes part of my overall bank account. I have had similar discussions with other staff members in the past, and none of them saw much issue with it. And - to be fair, I still personally see little issue in terms of morals in this whole thing. That being said, I've also not done a great job of communicating that to you guys, either. The only place you'll see this in the Terms of Service on the donation site. And, in fairness, it's nothing new. It's been a policy since 2014 - for one key reason. I've always maintained that I will never, at any point rely on donations to keep CU running, because donation income can be unreliable at best. And with the sheer amount of expenses we have, it's simply not feasible anyways. After having two members of my team chew me out and even go so far as to compare me to Killerteddy himself - an accusation I strongly disagree with since Teddy was known for forcing other past CU staff to pay the bills in his absence - I think that I should, if nothing else, consult you guys about this, and use that to decide how I handle donations going forward. First, I want to explain my perspective. CU's bills stretch far beyond what anyone would call reasonable. I've managed to gather every single domain that had any connection to Chaotic United in any way, shape, or form - a lot of them. Overall, I pay for roughly 40ish domains, each of which are 13 dollars a year. You can figure out the rest - it's a hefty chunk of change. Additionally, there's a VPS that hosts Discord bots and our Beta 1.7.3 server ($14/month), a webhost which powers the forums for CU and Elaztek ($13/month), and a dedicated server which runs our Main and Modded MC servers ($48/month). In fairness - up until these past couple months, Michael has been paying for the Dedicated server. It wasn't until very recently that I've been able to actually take over those payments (and even then, we aren't done moving stuff over yet). But everything else is already being paid for by me, and has been for some time. However considering how much money I (or my father in some cases) have put in, I saw treating donations with the same liberty as personal spending money as no issue. And at the end of the day, if the money just sat idle as a pool for the bills to come out of, the end result is the same. Perhaps part of me having this mentality is just fear of becoming reliant on donations - there's been enough this year to cover several months of dedicated server bills, for sure. But, that's all in the past - and isn't the primary purpose for this announcement. This announcement is about the future. If you feel genuinely upset, betrayed, or hurt by this - I give you my deepest apologies. I genuinely never imagined it to be any real issue at the end of the day. And, whether I think I'm becoming closer to Teddy than I'd like or not - I want to still do right by you guys. So, I'll leave it up to you. First, I'll be making a poll. Do any of you guys feel that donations should be exclusively used for server bills? Do you think that I'm justified in using them how I desire considering the overall situation? Do you just not give 2 shits either way? Let me know with the choices below. Going forward, as we migrate things to new servers and eventually migrate to a new donation store software entirely, what I'm going to look into doing is making this whole thing a user choice at checkout. The idea is basically that, as a user, you can choose to ensure your money goes directly back into CU, or if you don't care - then it gives me free license to do what I want with it. Until such a system takes place, however, the poll on this announcement will determine what happens to donations after today. However, unlike past polls, I'm not gonna just pick whoever has more than the other. If it's a close result, then I'll just stay on the safe side and keep funds for CU usage only. The only way I'll be using funds freely is if that option wins out by an overwhelming majority (say 75% to 80% or more). However, there's one more thing I want to try and do. If you honestly, truly, and deeply feel like I have wronged you by misuse of donations, DM me. I can't give any time frames but I'll do my best to try and refund you personally as soon as I'm able. My current work hours are incredibly shit so it's liable to be many, many months down the road. Keep in mind that doing this will result in you not having the rank anymore - obviously - and if every single person who has ever donated asks for their donations back, I probably won't be able to do it for a couple of years even. I do still have bills to pay, after all. Note: If you wish to claim a refund you must do so within 2 weeks of this announcement (by June 8, 2020). Any refund requests afterwards will not be honored. So, uh, yeah. That's it. This isn't about any new features or anything like that, though there are some of those in the works as always. Once again, if you feel hurt or betrayed or offended by this - I'm sorry - and I'll do everything within my reach to make it right. Because, at the end of the day, I am not Killerteddy1.

Alright, so as of recently there seems to have been some controversy about CU's donation perks. I have been told by a few people that I should remove and/or limit the use of /item, /fly, and /gamemode perks. My stance has been, and still is, to maintain the system exactly as set up by the old CU. This has worked just fine for the past almost 4 years, but this past week people have suddenly had an issue with it - enough where I feel a poll should be conducted regarding this as well as another idea that has been presented to me: a Semi-Vanilla server. Now, this idea is something I mentioned in the previous announcement as something I would not do, but this was in the concept of replacing the main server with such a server. The idea I am presenting now is to have this as a separate server entirely, likely BungeeCord-ed with the main server for easily going between the two. This server would have some basic stuff - /home, /me, CUEmotes, Residence, WorldGuard, Essentials, anticheat, and possibly a single donation rank with a few added perks (maybe) - but that's about it. Staff would have only the extra perks needed to effectively check grief and fix it, moderate, and so on, which excludes a lot of the typical stuff that can be seen as "extras", which means they can play legitimately right beside players. This idea is something that ND experimented with right before we merged with them originally, and it seemed to do well. This idea has been mentioned to me by a few people as well, and while I absolutely will never replace the primary server with this, I believe that setting it up and making it a reality would be both easy on the team and easy on our available server hardware. The poll presents various voting options for how these things should be handled, and get your guys' interests figured out. A couple things to note before we wrap up this topic though: On the 2nd question (the one regarding the perks directly and with the most choices), please PICK TWO - and ONLY two. If you do not pick two, your votes will be ignored entirely. Additionally, these votes do NOT guarantee that we will go in that direction (or not exactly specifically), this is meant to see where current user interest lies and doesn't automatically determine the exact direction we will go. Rather, the votes you make will be taken into consideration when we do decide. This doesn't mean that what the winning vote is won't happen, it just means that us (the CU Staff) ultimately reserve the choice to do what we feel is the best for the future of the community. Also, if you select "Other" for that 2nd question, make sure you give us your idea by replying! The cooldown that was mentioned in the first question was implemented today - it is 15 seconds per use of the command. More details on the update can be found here: Lastly, if you happen to be a donator of these ranks, we want your feedback especially, as everything that was suggested thus far was (mostly) from people who didn't wield these powers. We look forward to hearing your feedback, and we thank you for your interest and participation in helping make CU better!