With all this database explosion siftbot crisis I think everyone's forgotten about the financial crisis here.

There's a lot of "rebuilding the sift" going on but do we really want to rebuild something that we can't afford?

The donations only run another week and it's stuck around 25%... so my question is this... does that mean we have to turn off the servers on March 25th because we ran out of money? Perhaps the donations dried up because people no longer have confidence in the system.

Maybe we are not so close to disaster, but how close to that point are we and why?

Are we going to be able to see the accounts and server requirements to figure out how to fix this or are we just gonna wait until we die under a sea of SQL queries about comment votes?

Seriously, it's kinda cute to see everyone coming together to help the sift after the levees broke, but afaik we still have a serious problem here that threatens much more than the correlation between past upvotes and usernames.