Donation button?

Dan S
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I was reading in another thread about the financial challenges involved in running the site. I realize that there is some revenue from subscriptions and ads, but I was thinking that some members might occasionally make voluntary donations if there was a convenient way to do it, e.g. after making a sale through the forum listings.

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Donate to Omega Forums
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rendo
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This makes a lot of sense to me. I think selling on OF should require a paid subscription. On top of that, frequent private sellers should consider donating.
 
Larry S
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Indeed. My local PBS stations, Wikipedia, FireFox etc all have donate utilities. I contribute beyond my annual support.
 
dsio
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Dan S Dan S
I was reading in another thread about the financial challenges involved in running the site. I realize that there is some revenue from subscriptions and ads, but I was thinking that some members might occasionally make voluntary donations if there was a convenient way to do it, e.g. after making a sale through the forum listings.
I might have a chat to Trev about it, stripe might be a better option as PayPal are pretty bad to deal with, especially overseas

rendo rendo
This makes a lot of sense to me. I think selling on OF should require a paid subscription. On top of that, frequent private sellers should consider donating.
Tying payments to sales was something we really wanted to avoid because when there are disagreements or disputes that arise, we really want everyone to be on a level footing without there being a conflict of interest because someone pays us and the other doesn’t. I feel pretty strongly about that which is why we didn’t allow people to skip the 200 post queue or get priority for a fee
 
Canuck
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The easiest way to contribute would be to increase your level of financial participation by going up a level (for example) moving from tier 1 to tier 2. Why not a tier 3?
 
rendo
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dsio dsio
Tying payments to sales was something we really wanted to avoid because when there are disagreements or disputes that arise, we really want everyone to be on a level footing without there being a conflict of interest because someone pays us and the other doesn’t.
I see your point. I just find it unfair that some frequent sellers don't help to paying the bills.
 
MtnMarine
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I think this is a great idea. One of my jeep forums has a donation button and it gets used regularly. And OF is ran much better with more traffic!
 
dsio
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MtnMarine MtnMarine
I think this is a great idea. One of my jeep forums has a donation button and it gets used regularly. And OF is ran much better with more traffic!
We appreciate the compliment mate, we’re working on some further significant improvements to come too. Trevs looking into what we can put together easily along with a donors list page similar to the members page to thank anyone who does as it would mean a great deal to us
 
dsio
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Just realised while looking into this, the same bot protection we had to implement to keep the AI scrapers away also blocked stripe for subscriptions the last week or so since that to uses a bot (though a useful one) so that's fixed now at least
 
Vercingetorix
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There are lots of members here who could use an upgrade for those who wish to support.
 
ErichKeane
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Vercingetorix Vercingetorix
There are lots of members here who could use an upgrade for those who wish to support.
FWIW, this thread is the reason I learned about memberships, so now I is one 😀
 
pdxleaf
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dsio dsio
So this link should now work, @Trev is working on making it a bit cleaner looking and adding a board to recognise people for it.

Donate to Omega Forums
Without seeming like a stingy dastard, are there any suggested levels? "If everyone did their part, OF could run forever on $$$ per year." Or "Buy a set of depends and a coffee so Trev can stay glued to his chair another 24 hours working on OF."

I hope this isn't dampening the feeling of goodwill and generosity from Dan's suggestion.
 
dsio
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pdxleaf pdxleaf
Without seeming like a stingy dastard, are there any suggested levels? "If everyone did their part, OF could run forever on $$$ per year." Or "Buy a set of depends and a coffee so Trev can stay glued to his chair another 24 hours working on OF."

I hope this isn't dampening the feeling of goodwill and generosity from Dan's suggestion.
Currently we’re running about a 3k per month deficit, next month will be higher, closer to 4k because of Bytedance’s behaviour over the last month but it should be back to around 3k after that, we’re down about 30k-35k for the year as we had duplicated servers for part of the year while getting the new version of the site live which is why I’m still going to move on that A386 too
 
Speed2Sea
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Canuck Canuck
The easiest way to contribute would be to increase your level of financial participation by going up a level (for example) moving from tier 1 to tier 2. Why not a tier 3?
Or at minimum become a Tier 1 supporter.
 
JimJupiter
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dsio dsio
Currently we’re running about a 3k per month deficit, next month will be higher, closer to 4k because of Bytedance’s behaviour over the last month but it should be back to around 3k after that, we’re down about 30k-35k for the year as we had duplicated servers for part of the year while getting the new version of the site live which is why I’m still going to move on that A386 too
Maybe you can publish this figures and make it more transparent what your costs are, and what comes in. Makes it easier for most of us to understand and probably to spend more money. One could think "hey my wordpress is for free 😁 .

3k loss per month is huge and the risk losing this page at all is there I guess. Something nobody wants here.

Nico
 
Trev
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JimJupiter JimJupiter
Maybe you can publish this figures and make it more transparent what your costs are, and what comes in. Makes it easier for most of us to understand and probably to spend more money. One could think "hey my wordpress is for free 😁 .

3k loss per month is huge and the risk losing this page at all is there I guess. Something nobody wants here.

Nico
I suppose we didn't want to go full Wikipedia 😁
 
pdxleaf
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Trev Trev
I suppose we didn't want to go full Wikipedia 😁
You've already got the annoyance of managing thousands of 'expert' editors (like myself 😏 ), some sort of wiki fundraiser seems fair.

The amount of the deficit is eye-opening. If not posting actual numbers, maybe some sort of fuel gauge that let's us know when the tank is low. Your decision of course. Thanks for all your work.
 
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