Dear What.CD Community,



Our pockets are nearly empty, and we need your help.



What.CD celebrated its fourth birthday just weeks ago. Time has passed more quickly than any of us could have imagined, and these four years have heralded unprecedented growth since the tracker’s inception. While we now sustain roughly 150,000 active users and are home to over 1,250,000 torrents, we’ve also been driven for over 1,461 days by a brilliant, dedicated community and the efforts of countless contributors without whom our corner of the internet would be that much less meaningful. Our grand project has become greater than the sum of its parts, and while it is undoubtedly true that together we’ve built the world’s largest, private BitTorrent tracker, this fact omits an important detail: we’ve also built the world’s best private BitTorrent tracker.



Since our earliest days - when What.CD was a mere embryonic dream in WhatMan’s head - our invite policy has never been motivated by elitism. Instead, we’ve consistently and fairly encouraged the most dedicated music fans to call What.CD a home. When met with ignorance, we’ve aspired to teach. When confronted by the excluded, we pioneered the interviewing system. Besieged by dwindling standards, we’ve uncompromisingly raised the bar. This inexhaustible spirit has made all the difference, and our community is now one of the most articulate and passionate in the BitTorrent world. All of us - together - have accomplished this feat without remaining closed-off and cold toward outsiders, but perpetually open to anyone wanting to help this music repository approach perfection.



Our growth has come with costs. In this case, the costs are literal. Just shy of a year since our last donation announcement (which coincided with the IFPI’s disruption of our PayPal donations), we now regret to inform you that the enormity of our undertaking has produced an overwhelming financial burden. What.CD’s monthly bills are massive, and this excludes the additional costs of new servers, upgrades and snags in the road. It was once possible for us to tap into reserve funds during donation droughts, but this was before our costs ballooned with an exploding population, increased bandwidth demands and the loss of a convenient donation service. Our reserves are rapidly running dry, and now we appeal to you - our community.



This is where we stand:



We ask anyone who can spare the money to please donate to What.CD in the immediate future. Any donation (small or large) will make a dent in our bills. This money will help ensure What.CD’s continued survival. Please click here to donate now!



The loss of PayPal as a reliable means of donating deeply frustrated our ability to meet our monthly needs, and we began accepting Flattr donations over ten months ago. We sympathize with anyone who feels that using Flattr is a more complicated process. If you’d like to donate but feel stifled by the procedure, please don’t give up! Send a Staff PM, a site PM or request assistance in #what.cd-help. There’s an enormous support structure in place, so please - for the sake of the site - use it! Lastly and quite importantly, read the wiki article about donating via Flattr. Many answers to simple problems can be found there. In his appeal almost a year ago, WhatMan mentioned that the announcement was the first of its kind. This is our second appeal. We hope to be here years from now, and the only way this dream can be made real is if we survive this trying time. Let’s survive together.



In order to facilitate new donors, we’ve also partnered up with traveling to offer our first ‘Donation Gift’. Traveling is now selling beer/cold beverage koozies emblazoned with What.CD’s very own mascot, Rippy!









100% of the profits earned from each koozie sold will go toward the site. Additionally, each sale will qualify the purchaser for donor status (as the profit earned from each koozie is roughly around our minimum requirement). The koozies are priced at $10 apiece, and can be considered the first in what could become a line of premium What.CD donation items if the experiment proves successful. The koozies can be purchased via PayPal directly from Traveling’s Port Merch store. Please note that some costs are involved in the production and shipping of each koozie, so if you’d like to make a direct donation of any size, Flattr remains a reliable option.



Whether you can afford to donate or not, we’d like to thank you for being members of our community. What.CD wouldn’t exist without you. Your uploads, your reports, your posts, your creativity and your infallible spirit give What.CD its character and its purpose. Together we’ve made What.CD the biggest and the best. We now have a chance to make it a marathon champion. What do you say?



With Love,







What.CD Staff