RedState is complaining (HT: Firedoglake) that they cannot get the support they need to fix their website from the developers of Scoop, a product that is connected with that cesspool of leftist politics Kuro5hin. Here's the full post, where they beg for money to help them make the transition to Drupal in its entirety:

When we started RedState in May of 2004, we used a website program called Scoop â€" the same program a lot of similar sites on the left used. But, as the number of visitors to our site grew, Scoop kept crashing on us.

If we’d been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren’t really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us. We kept crashing and were out of money. We had to close down or take drastic action.

Well, we didn’t close down. We ditched Scoop and moved to the best alternative at the time, a program called Drupal. But, in accomplishing the switch, budget constraints forced us to sacrifice some popular site features in order to alleviate the strain on our overused servers.

Needless to say, we always regarded those “downgrades” as temporary, and we hoped to restore the eliminated features â€" and to add new and even better ones â€" as soon as we could afford to.

Unfortunately, we still can’t afford to. But we’re convinced that America can afford even less to have us operating at anything less than our absolute peak potential during the coming presidential election season.

So we’ve decided to move ahead with our upgrades without delay, and despite not having the cash on hand â€" hoping and praying that RedState.com readers like you will help us make up the shortfall with a generous donation.

Drupal, WordPress and Movable Type were around, all with robust communities in 2004. It's not like Scoop was the only game in town back then if you wanted to start a blog. There have been plenty of open source possibilities for getting a site like this set up, but they always required you to get your hands a little bit dirty integrating them in a way that makes sense for your needs.

The post on Redstate, “Attention, Ron Paul Supporters (Life is *REALLY* Not Fair),” begins, “Effective immediately, new users may *not* shill for Ron Paul in any way shape, form or fashion. Not in comments, not in diaries, nada. If your account is less than 6 months old, you can talk about something else, you can participate in the other threads and be your zany libertarian self all you want, but you cannot pimp Ron Paul. Those with accounts more than six months old may proceed as normal.”

Adding to the irony, Ron Paul has attracted a great deal of following among people who are skilled in things like software engineering and programming. There are a lot of Ron Paul supporters who could have easily come to RedState's aid and helped it to make the transition nearly painless.

**UPDATE**: It gets worse. Read on to see the contents of a fundraiser/begging email they sent out to their mailing list that I received (I forgot that I had signed up a long time ago).

In the coming weeks (or months, depending on how many kindly give to the effort) we will, with no doubt, be launching Red State version 3. We can, and we will. You know those teaser screenshots of Erick's? Those are not mockups. They are from a real, live, functioning development site we have up. It's just not done, and we need to get it done.

The new site is so close, I'm excited. I'm grinning from ear to ear. I'm not hyped up for any of the reasons that generally get talked about at length, though. In a sense, I think the coming transition is emblematic of a greater change for the better coming to Red State.

But, we need you to open your wallet to make it happen.
 
Since its founding, Red State has been great at two things: community and commentary. However the one thing we've never consistently done is make the step toward activism. Yes, we've had some fundraising success (helping Egland drive out Doolittle comes to mind immediately), but in my time here the site has never been focused on going out and effecting change.

I believe there is a reason for this: our software has not matched our proper model. By using first the software of Daily Kos, and then a one-size-fits-all package made for ease on the installer, we forced ourselves and the whole community to try to conform to the software, and the activism here suffered.

The Scoop model works great at Daily Kos because of the nature of their ideology. They are the left. They are levelers, they are equalizers, they seek to bulldoze all natural distinctions to force everyone into some Marxist utopian mush. We though, have what Russell Kirk praised as the diversity appreciated by the conservatives. We live in different places, we have different priorities, and we have different needs for activism success. Further, we have loyalties to established order when the institutions have proven themselves; we're not crashing gates and formenting revolution.

Red State 3 will give our wonderful community the opportunity to go in this new direction we need. Using other peoples' software and trying to use other movements' models has not worked, but going our own way once and for all will let us find our own Republican model of activism. I find this idea deeply exciting, and that is why I am committed to seeing it through.

I want it done, and fortunately I have ten years experience in website front end and back end development to make it useful. Erick knows this, too, and our efforts are being scheduled accordingly. The money given to the effort by our readers will be spent wisely. It first goes to getting the system in a functional state, such that we can get it launched, and so that I can begin doing the extra work that needs done to give Red State the functionality and polish we need and you want, to ensure our community is not held back. This way, the things I can do for us for free, can be done for free.

All the best,

Neil Stevens

Contributor, RedState.com

P.S. -- A fully armed and operational RedState 3.0 will be a powerful tool for the right in 2008. To donate, simply click here and give as generously as you can.