The Future of Our Community and Its Funding

[troed]

Chris, I have no doubts you're having your hands full here - please don't misunderstand. However, some of the things that take time can be alleviated in other ways where much less manual work has to go into it. I'll take two examples from what you wrote and then I'll leave this discussion again because it's not _important_ - it was more about how it's easy to go down the path of paying other entities money where other solutions exist.

1) Forum signup bots. One way would be to develop custom code (there are developers on this forum even though you're not one yourself!) that randomises signup questions etc so that they cannot reuse/share.

2) SSH attacks? Only use key based login, disallow passwords, then ignore them.

Please don't take it upon yourself to handle it all

/Troed

[exxos]

I have been looking at the logs for those who do subscriptions (thanks) though I'm starting to think this is not such a great idea...

Basically the processing costs are 1.5% + 20p. Which does not sound much, but for example, £1 a month means I only get 78p per payment. Basically over a year £12 becomes £9.36. Whereas if someone actually made a £12 one off donation, it would become £11.62. So subscriptions involving multiple transaction changes, isn't very cost effective I think.. At least not for low values.

Of course I'm are not trying to put people off subscribing, though I think people need to be aware that the transaction costs of doing this are a lot higher because they are happening multiple times. I never thought to actually take the transaction charges into account with the yearly running costs either.

I've also been looking into trying to get the "sponsor" badges working on the forum. While the backend is now programmed, (not yet tested until someone makes a new donation) , I have not finished the forum side of the code yet either.. But I've run into a problem (again) that subscription events do not trigger the username collected after the initial payment. I have asked Stripe if any common data is sent between the 2 types of payments, but it doesn't even trigger the normal checkout events which my scripts use. Basically there may not be any way to link a user to a subscription payment..

A possible workaround is that I just go on the subscription created and subscription cancelled events (when I find out what they actually are) but I still need some information to link who subscribed and unsubscribed to link it to the forum badges anyway.

I am waiting for Stripe to reply to my questions again, though at this point its looking like sponsor badges may only be available for one-off donations and not subscribers.. I think that way it would be somewhat unfair to the subscribers, so I may have to just forget the whole badge idea unless there is a simple way to keep track of payments.. I cannot imagine there is nothing common between payments but it is not a system I have looked into before..

[exxos]

Currently this system is extremely experimental and no doubt has bugs somewhere..It has all been incredibly complicated to set up

The sponsor badge should be showing for the majority of people who made a donation.. However if you make a donation with anything but your forum name then you will have to let me know which donation is yours on the donations page and I will update the name to your forum name.

The sponsor badges as they are using the phpbb ranks system, donations made by moderators (IE not the default registered user rank) will not be updated because the badge currently says "moderator" or whatever. Registered users basically have a user rank of zero and those are the only ones which get updated to the rank of sponsor.

As said previously, it is difficult to know where to draw the line with this but basically every £1 donated gives you a week of the sponsor badge.

So for those who made for example, a £50 donation, will have the badge for 50 weeks. If you make another donation during this time then it will be the cumulative to your "badge total time".

Subscriptions are a little bit tricky , but the same rule applies, so basically you would need £4 a month subscription to have the badge displayed continuously (assuming 4 weeks in a month) . When your subscription renews, the sponsor badge will display again automatically.

The wiki donation page displays the last time for the donation per users, whether it a single donation or subscription. I am totalling a number of subscriptions on the wiki so we don't end up with a massive long list of the same users or something.

If people want to make a donation without the sponsor badge, then use your real name or some abbreviation which does not match your forum name.. Alternatively you can leave the entry blank and it will just be listed as "Anonymous" on the donate page. Incidentally anonymous donations are still linked to your stripe accounts "customer ID". So usernames are not relevant to keep track of how many times some particular users actually did a donation.. As long as the payment method does not change that is..

The whole system is scripted, so if all goes well, anyone who makes a donation next should automatically get the sponsor badge and automatically be updated on the donation page on the wiki.. It may take some time to iron out it all out. It is difficult to test next month's subscription cycle when they have not yet happened.. But I have tried to do this under simulation as much as possible.. So it *should* work...

Again thanks so much for everyone who has contributed to the running costs!

[stephen_usher]

I couldn't find how to set the amount for the subscription, which defaulted to £1, which I couldn't seem to change.

[exxos]

I couldn't find how to set the amount for the subscription, which defaulted to £1, which I couldn't seem to change.

You alter the "quantity". The default is £1 to allow people to set whatever quantity they like. If I set the value to £5 then it would only be in steps of £5 when quantity is changed. So the default has to be £1. It all help nonetheless

[Badwolf]

I've just chipped in my commission from my PCBWay projects page thing.

It feels like it's a kind of a competitor operation (it's not, but, you know, same territory isn't it?) so it seems like a neat bit of feedback.

It's a fairly paltry amount I'm afraid as I got stiffed for about half of it on account of a BOM cockup. But perhaps it'll be better next time!

BW

[exxos]

I've just chipped in my commission from my PCBWay projects page thing.

It feels like it's a kind of a competitor operation (it's not, but, you know, same territory isn't it?) so it seems like a neat bit of feedback.

It's a fairly paltry amount I'm afraid as I got stiffed for about half of it on account of a BOM cockup. But perhaps it'll be better next time!

But please don't contribute anything if it takes monies away from doing your stuff

[exxos]

I realised there was a "huge flaw" in how donations were calculated it wouldn't have significantly made any difference at this point in time but the calculations were simply wrong.

Originally I had all the donations logged on the wiki. Then decided it wasn't a good idea as such because of the people which were making donations by subscriptions would just be listed multiple times in the same list and the list would get incredibly long.. So decided to group together names and just increase a donation account instead.. Not then realising that only the last donation was actually been included in the totals

After battling with stripe support.. About a week ago they said customer IDs were the only consistent thing across all payments to keep track of users.. I went with this method because the "name to credit" field is only populated on the initial payment, whether it be a one-off donation or subscription.. However, I have now worked out myself and stripe have also said that guests donations do not have the customer ID, and in fact, the payment links themselves do not even support customer IDs.. So the whole system I wrote to keep track of payments was simply never going to work

So I spent the past couple of days totally rewriting the back end of the donation system AGAIN. The only consistent thing really is email addresses. So whether it be a subscription payment or a one-off payment, assuming the email address is the same, the data should be linked to the user name to credit from the very first payment where that field was actually populated. Basically each time a email address is found, it does a "lookup" in the donations database to see if a forum name is linked in the database or not already. If there is no matches, then it assumes it is the first payment and it saves the username. The second payment (for subscriptions) which does not have the name Phil populated, is done via a donations database look up to find out what the last username was for that email address. Then the data is all correspondingly correctly updated..

So basically I've gone back to logging all the payments individually. Only this time, the "donations list" on the wiki will automatically groups together the number of donations per username.

Next up I need to take all the scripts out of test mode and make them live.....

[exxos]

The new donation scripts are now online...

I don't think anything broke during the update

[PhilC]

Cool, I'll make a donation when I get a mo. I'm more likely to do one offs that a subscription sort of thing.