The problem with donations is that they aren't recurring. Donation-based systems also just don't bring in much money. I also just don't need the money.

The limiting factor with the Guild has been my time, and donations aren't going to pay my wage to work on the Guild and address its problems. 

The real problem is that 1) the Guild's core code is one year old and can't scale anymore and 2) I'm the bottleneck for *everything*, even trivial bugfixes and typos.

At the moment, I'm rewriting the Guild's core to factor in everything I've learned about scaling the Guild this past year. I'm making some fundamental changes so that it has no scaling issues. That addresses point #1.

To address point #2, I'm rewriting the logic in Javascript and using Postgres (SQL) for the database. And then I'm open-sourcing the codebase so that tech-savvy community members can contribute patches to the codebase and I can merge them in. Javascript and SQL are two of the most commonly used web technologies, and that's intentional. I want there to be an almost zero barrier to entry to helping out with the Guild. Even if you're a newbie programmer, you should still be able to submit a patch for something like a typo or a templating glitch. More experienced developers can implement more high-profile patches. I'll be able to review these patches, test them, and merge them in.

I'll provide an update once I hit my first milestone: inviting users to test the code on my development server.