As some of you may have heard, the future of the Deskthority mechanical keyboard forum is uncertain after the current owners have offered it for sale. It was suggested that I head up a group buy effort to coordinate a group buy to collect funds for me to purchase the site with the intention of leaving things as they are (additional details are in the Google forms link below). This is a terrific forum and along with geekhack and reddit MK it is a great place for learning and discussion on mechanical keyboards!
“Today I reached out to this site’s proprietor expressing my interest and received a thoughtfully written reply including the information that they are looking for $15k for the site and that an offer for $5k was turned down. My guess is that the final price may settle around $7.5k to $10k if they wish to proceed with a sale. For someone looking to buy the site, server costs for a private dedicated server with 1 gigabit/second guaranteed bandwidth, 64GB RAM, and a 2023 Intel processor would be about $55 to $65 a month including backup storage.
I would be happy to coordinate a group buy for the site (I have coordinated some group buys before!).
Below is the Google forms link I have just created, where I have included additional details.
I would have to collect the funds by Venmo, Zelle, Transferwise (wise), check, etc. so as not to affect my merchant card processor which may not like collecting funds for funds outside my normal area of selling goods.
Please only sign the form if you can realistically send funds in the next month or two.”