Over the last few months there has been a significant drop in donations (4 donations since March), so some of our staff have been paying our monthly running costs as well as developing awesomeness for your servers. So, in an effort to keep our forums running on great hardware and to finally (hopefully) give us the opportunity to send some of the donation funds to our wonderful developers, they have come up with an idea;
Development Donation Goals will allow them to release new features while helping to keep our forums running, and eventually lead to them getting some well-deserved cash for their efforts to support you all, which they've been doing for free for many many years with little to no recognition.
The concept is simple. On the Donations page along with the normal "Donate to rAthena" button there will now be "Development Goals" for specific features. I'll also add this to the right-hand module area on the board index. Once the target has been met, the devs will release that particular feature. None of our developers have ever been a fan of individual devs selling features or code that would benefit the entire community, as that's not the aim of an open-source project, so I'm supporting them fully with this decision.
Every little helps!
P.S. You can also use your account credit towards donation goals by sending me a PM and describing how much of your credit you would like applying to which donation goal. Credit donations are converted at a ratio of 2:1.