Talk:Rodovid Charitable Foundation

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[edit] Some history from Baya

I'm paying for Rodovid hosting from the beginning of this project. At the beginning (2005 year) it costed approximately $3 per month :). During the first year the cost raised up to $30-$50 per month. For the last five years this payment raised from approximately $120 per month to $170 per month. Last two months because of non understandable increasing of requests the fee increased to approx $200.

I tried to use advertisement to pay for hosting - but I didn't want to spam Rodovid users, so there where minimum of advertisement (some time even only for anonymous) so it was small income in first 2014 year of usage (covers approx 60% of hosting). In first months of 2018 it became negligible ($2 or $4 per month) - so I removed it completely. Many times I tried to raise the question about donation for hosting and maybe small support.

At the same time I tried to decrease the hosting price, for example, Rodovid has functionality to import gedcom files. With this functionality it started to consume more resources and raise too quickly and become too expensive for me. At that time it was just impossible for me to pay for so much resources. I decided to disable gedcom import.

The user registration - at some moment, instead of resolving the bot problem, anonymous registration, etc, I simply blocked new user registration just to decrease amount of users - to decrease hosting payments. But community found the non documented way to register new users - I do not block it - so every month now Rodovid has approximately 15-20 new users.

The basic search - instead of resolving some issues - it also was turned off to decrease payments (approx 2.5 times).

But maybe I wasn't clear enough, or there were no simple ways to collect donations, or something else, the co-payment for hosting was never resolved.

In 2002 the most influential language community of Rodovid - French community - organised "Généalogie Rodovid" French association. I'm greatly appreciate Christophe Tesson efforts in this direction.

In April 2025 my old partner and friend suggested starting to collect donations to support Rodovid - and very important, he suggested organizing it by himself (mostly). So, the foundation was registered, the site of the foundation was created, the bank accounts were registered, and the first fundraising round was announced. Now everyone can see online how much funds were collected web hosting for Rodovid.org. It was decided to provide detailed report about the foundation activity quarterly.

I hope we will find the way to support Rodovid hosting (as a minimum). And it will be possible for me, personally, to give my efforts into further Rodovid technical development. And community will have possibility to use and develop Rodovid in all possible modern ways.

sincerely, --Baya 10:59, 6 September 2025 (EEST)

[edit] Rodovid Charitable Foundation

[edit] Généalogie Rodovid

Creation of the "Rodovid genealogy" association in France.
Creation of the "Rodovid genealogy" association in France.

Hello everyone.

Here in France, we already created an "association" on April 9, 2022: "généalogie Rodovid" (Rodovid Genealogy). The goal was the same: to raise funds for web hosting and updates to the "Rodovid Engine" software. I must admit that this association's operations are very average…

But it still exists. It should be added that the term "association" is very specific in French law. It is not a charitable fund, but a constitutional and republican right to come together around an idea. Such associations, however, have the right to raise funds to defend their idea.

Whatever that idea may be.

We would be very happy to participate in a video meeting; unfortunately, few of us speak Ukrainian, or even English.

Personally, I have many requests for updates, including the need to split Rodovid into as many sites as there are languages, as Wikipedia has done. But it's probably too early to talk about it. --Christophe Tesson - talk. 10:50, 5 September 2025 (EEST)

  • I remember that we had started discussion about french association ... And I think it is very good that we already have it. It is also should be discussed how we combine all this stuff to achieve best results. (how to collect donation, how much we should pay to banks, etc.)
  • I think for online meeting it will be good to use English. :) But anyway we could discuss it here - so it could be easier to read and write ..
  • About splitting. We already have 25 different sites for every configured language in Rodovid, as Wikipedia has done. Could you please add more details, what is wrong with current splitting? --Baya 12:35, 5 September 2025 (EEST)
I mean : if I edit some french page, i wish it doesn't modify english or any other localization. --Christophe Tesson - talk. 18:43, 5 September 2025 (EEST)

[edit] Topics to discuss

[edit] Developments

Thanks for your explanations which clarify the evolution (past and future) of the site.
Is Paypal an option to donate?

  •  Currently, PayPal business accounts (charities are also on business accounts) cannot be opened on PayPal Ukraine's website, only individual accounts can. So, this is currently not possible. — Stanley 02:10, 7 September 2025 (EEST)
  • Maybe French association could help with it in some way? I just can add that the business account that we have in the monobank does not take any commission for all donation. Also on the bank donation page it is clearly visible how much are already gathered. And as it was decided (we could also rediscuss it) the first report will be announced at the end of this quarter, before October 10. --Baya 18:57, 7 September 2025 (EEST)

We are a bit worried : do you have debts with banks? Or with maffia rings? Does someone threaten to break your fingers? (Some French users probably have forks and hunting rifles, if needed!)

  • No, no and no :). The question is if community want and could take a part in supporting of hosting and development. For example, the code base of 1.44 mediawiki, I think, 3-5 times more than 1.9.3 - it means that after upgrading it will requires 20-30% resources more. Enabling basic search requires approximately 2.5 times more resources as now or if elastic search will be used instead of basic search it will require in addition approximately $150 - $200 per month (but it could support 5-6 times bigger database compare to current, on the other hand 150-200 is a minimal cost for elastic cluster). The user registration graph is on right - what do you think how much it will cost, if the user registration be enabled? --Baya 18:57, 7 September 2025 (EEST)

Do you think that the increase of hits in July and August could be linked with the SPF record you added, because it would have given Rodovid a better ranking with gmail / Google?

  • No, I doubt that google uses spf in the ranking algorithm. I suppose that many modern AIs (not only biggest one) start scanning internet aggressively. But also all these new requests don't have any bot or crawling mentions in their user-agent descriptions. --Baya 18:57, 7 September 2025 (EEST)

Do you think we should stop the registration of new users?

  • It's not important with a such level of new registrations. --Baya 18:57, 7 September 2025 (EEST)

Do you plan to create trees for places based on present-day administrative structures, while historical sovereignties would be managed through the system of categories?
(It would probably be too complicated to do the same for surnames and etymologies). :-((

  •  A very good question. The Places shall be arranged into a separate project. It is mentioned in the roadmap in the Step three as Toponyms. — Stanley 02:13, 7 September 2025 (EEST)

As for possible developments, history of records can sometimes be confusing when the log says that a father had been added one day by a user while in reality the connection had been created months before by a different user in the record of the father in another localization.
So do you think that it could be a good idea to create a read-only common localization where all changes on a record would be registered immediately, with an indication of each page and language from which family connections (and couple connections, and dates / picture) are transfered?

About full trees, will there be a possibility to display names in white letters when the colored background of a record is too dark? Dn Gov (d) 15:00, 6 September 2025 (EEST)

  •  It will be part of a major design update, which is also planned in the roadmap in the Step two. — Stanley 02:15, 7 September 2025 (EEST)
  • Common answer for all feature/bug requests processing. If we (all together) are ready to pay for growing, we all, together, will decide the priority of new feature or bug resolution development. For example, we can create discussion page about a feature, describe it precisely here, estimate some acceptable price for it (to have a real live score) and create a special fundraising for this feature, so what feature goal will be gathered first, this feature will go to development first. If you have other ideas, please, let us know. But it should not be a simple voting. I doubt that people who have 100K real edits should have same vote value as any just registered user. Anyway we could discuss the process of development or development priority as the first feature :) --Baya 18:57, 7 September 2025 (EEST)

[edit] Rodovid is such a special place

Rodovid is such a special place where I love to spend my free time adding trees. I’ve been using the site almost daily for a decade, and I was glad to donate. Thank you for providing this wonderful resource free of charge for so many years! --sashaz 04:12, 8 September 2025 (EEST)

  • Thank you for your kind and warm words and for your generous donation! --Baya 08:15, 8 September 2025 (EEST)
  • We appreciate your dedication for Rodovid! A true Rodovidian :) -- Stanley 00:35, 9 September 2025 (EEST)

[edit] Suggestion

Hello, In order to finance the site, could we consider two modes of access: one with a little advertising and another without for donors?

On the other hand, what I miss the most about Rodovid is the lack of community life and common actions.

Not speaking English, forgive me for using an automatic translator.

--Mamonaku 16:01, 8 September 2025 (EEST)

  • The last time, in 2008 year, the banner on every page gave approx $4 per month. Little advertising does not work. --Baya 17:29, 8 September 2025 (EEST)


Hello Baya,

I have been building my family tree on Rodovid for a very long time, and it has grown to an extensive scale. At times, I even recorded all people from an entire village over a considerable period. I was never focused on quantity; instead, I enjoyed seeing how many people were recorded, what connections exist, and where.

These connections are hard to replicate outside the site. On Rodovid, they are very well organized — for example, I can select a man who is a sister’s husband and explore the family tree from him. Then I can move to the husband of his sister, and so on. These connections can span entire villages.

I would really like to avoid losing access to this data. Is it possible to download a local copy of my own records, including photos, or even the entire database? Having a local copy would allow me to visualize it for myself or show it to someone else.

Thank you very much for your time and for all your work on Rodovid!

--MirMax 20:58, 8 November 2025 (EET)

[edit] Rodovid is the best genealogical site design in the world

Rodovid is the best genealogical site design in the world. Thanks to the author for maintaining it for so many years. It was a good idea of creating Charitable Foundation to keep it alive for a short term. But for the long term maintenance and development one should find some solid economic model. My concrete proposals are:

1) Keep the site free of charge for basic users and reopen free user subscription. Increase of the numbers of users will generate the increase of the number of donations, so there will be an economical effect. Certainly one should protect registrations from the bots with modern tools (for example send validation codes via E-mails or SMS). Do not allow gedcom loading for basic users, because the gedcom loading create many duplicated persons. It is very difficult to merge duplicated persons later. One of the best advantage of Rodovid to respect to other sites is the very low level of duplicates and it is very important to continue the efforts in this direction.

2) Introduce advanced users with monthly subscription (approx. in the range 10-20 Euros/months). The advanced users should have some privileges: advanced search tools, backup of their own contributions into gedcom files, higher resolution photos, no advertisement etc. etc.

3) Introduce private users with monthly subscription (approx 20-50 Euros/month). They should have the same rights on the public tree as advanced users, but in addition these private users should be able to upload their gedcoms (also photos, documents) into the special private trees, but NOT into the public tree. These private trees should be accessible only to the private owners, not to basic and advanced users. So they can put into these private trees the living and sensible persons without the danger to violate the privacy. They should also be able to make the links from the private persons to the related public persons (this is interesting for them in order not to care about maintenance of multiple famous and medieval persons who are already present in the Rodovid public tree). They should be able to invite the guests (for special monthly price 1-2 Euros/month/guest) to help to develop and view their private trees.--alexandre 16:41, 9 September 2025 (EEST)

4) The proposals described above, could be realized in the framework of non-profit organization using Charitable Foundation. For example "advanced users" can be "Silver Donators" and "private users" could "Gold Donators" and so one.--alexandre 19:31, 9 September 2025 (EEST)

  • Many thanks, Alexandre! For you inspiring words and donation! I appreciate it. We are also thinking more or less in the same way. Anyway it should be carefully discussed before implementation. --Baya 19:58, 9 September 2025 (EEST)
  • The most important steps now are site support and software updates. To have resources for development. --Baya 20:01, 9 September 2025 (EEST)

[edit] Rodovid Foundation receives grant from Amazon Web Services to cover hosting fees

The Rodovid Charitable Foundation has received a grant from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) to cover hosting fees of its projects. The grant to the tune of $1,000 in credits was provided under the AWS Credits Program for Nonprofits with the assistance from TechSoup Ukraine. -- Stanley 00:45, 14 September 2025 (EEST)

Good job! Will the grant be given for only one year (and go to someone else next time) or will it be available for several years? Dn Gov (d) 04:00, 14 September 2025 (EEST)
  • It is a one year grant. And it is possible to apply every year once per year. --Baya 08:51, 14 September 2025 (EEST)
This is excellent news that gives hope ! Bravo Baya ! --Mamonaku 11:44, 14 September 2025 (EEST)

[edit] Rodovid Charitable Foundation publishes income and expenditure report for Q3 2025

In total, the Foundation received UAH 27,102 (about USD 645), of which UAH 18,006 (about USD 429) was spent on statutory activities. — Stanley 01:13, 15 October 2025 (EEST)

[edit] Call for donations to pay for Rodovid cloud hosting in Q1 2026 + potential benefits for benefactors

Dear Rodovidians,

Last year, we were able to cover the cloud hosting fees for all the 25 localizations of Rodovid.org thanks to a $1,000 grant from AWS (as credits) and online donations from 21 donators to the tune of UAH 17,850 (about $412).

This year, we are announcing a new fundraising round for $750 to pay for Rodovid's cloud hosting in Q1 2026—from 1 January to 31 March 2026 (about $250 a month).

As of 1 January 2026, the remaining funds for the hosting were as follows:

  • UAH 2,477.35 (about $57)
  • USD 54.04 in AWS credits

As you can see, without your support, it will be hard for us in Ukraine to cover the cloud hosting fees ourselves.

Currently, Rodovid uses a server that runs to almost 100% of its capacity. This results in slower speeds for its users. We cannot afford a bigger server right now as this will result in much higher hosting fees.

To invite more donations, we have come up with a solution to launch an additional small server to process client requests for our benefactors much faster: everyone who donates any sum above $10 (for three months in Q1 2026), will be able to enjoy much higher speeds when working with their genealogical records on Rodovid.org.

To claim your eligibility, please, donate here and then send us a letter at foundation@rodovid.org with a receipt and your IP address, which will be whitelisted for the new faster server.


All the very best,

— Stanley 22:45, 8 February 2026 (EET)

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