Rant: paid $15 to save a 2005 flash game archive, site vanished anyway
Found this old Flash game site that somehow still had a playable version of that weird potato sorting game I loved in middle school. The owner had a tip jar saying the server cost $11 a month and any help kept it alive. I threw in $15 via Paypal. Two weeks later the whole domain just goes dark. No email, no redirect, nothing. Now I'm torn. Do we have a duty to send small amounts to keep these little corners of the internet alive, or are we just feeding a black hole where the money never reaches the actual hosting? I get that $15 isn't a fortune, but it's the principle. Has anyone else backed a dead site and watched it die anyway? Did you try again somewhere else, or did it kill the habit for good?
Man, I used to drop $5 here and there on every little retro site with a tip jar. Then three of them went dark within a year and I stopped cold. What got me was one guy actually posted a goodbye note saying thanks for the cash but he was done paying for a server nobody visited. At least he told us. The silence is what stings, not the money. Now I only chip in when the owner shows receipts or posts updates.