Fundraiser

SuperTuxKart Online is offline for now

We would love your help to get it back. We had to take the addons website down because of security risks. We are working on a rewrite, and your support would mean a lot. Sharing this page also helps a lot.

Progress

USD 590 of USD 4,000 (15%)

24 days left in the campaign

Company or serious sponsor? Reach out to us and we'll talk directly.

Why this funding goal is important

We want to be open about why the goal bar looks the way it does. The $10k on the bar isn't what we would hope to raise. It's what it would cost to pay one software engineer for a month. Our Patreon has only been open for a few months, and it brings in about $90 a month. That was meant to help keep an online service safe for thousands of players, and honestly, it just isn't enough. We would rather be upfront about that than keep acting like it is, because that's part of how we ended up here.

Why we decided to stop relying on it

The server behind SuperTuxKart Online (accounts, rankings, the server list, the addons repository) runs on a version of PHP that reached end of life years ago.

We could get the stk-addons service back up quickly by using a third-party backport of PHP. The rest of the code is a bigger problem. It's so outdated that it won't run on a modern PHP version without major changes, and it was written more than ten years ago by volunteers, for a different internet.

A few weeks ago, a cyber security association looked through parts of it pro bono. About several of the things they found, their advice was: "Do not put this back online, it has to be rewritten."

PHP2Shell is now being actively exploited, so we weren't going to ignore that. We were not hacked. We just didn't want to wait and find out, and we aren't willing to risk your accounts and data.

How to check this is real

Please check that this page is on a SuperTuxKart domain. Also check that the funding options on this page are the existing ones we already use.