PROPOSAL: Voluntary Membership Scheme

Site Stuff đź’ľ
1

Guys,

Mvertigo still needs to pay its bills.

I was recently approached by someone wishing to advertise their services on mvertigo.

We agreed an initial subscription based agreement for such advertising.

I’m in the process of implementing that.

At the same time, given I will need to add a Subscription system, I’m thinking of adding a voluntary membership scheme that may initially not offer any benefit except a show of support via a avatar flair that will be added to your account as “Supporter”. Perks may or may not be added later - if anyone has some ideas on that please respond below.

This will be priced at a very small amount (I’m conscious this condition can significantly affect people’s finances!), but the combined contributions will help with all the IT costs and some of my time (though I doubt I will ever get anything approaching a commercial hourly rate nor expect to achieve that!!).

The costs involved here include:

  • domain registration
  • server leasing
  • email service
  • API calls, e.g. Open AI provide our Topic summaries.
  • IT development and customisation

Let me know if you would be interested in contributing in this fashion.

And as a reminder, contribution can always be made in other ways by actively responding to other sufferers - this is always appreciated!

NB I’ve had one member mention they’d be keen to donate but dislike PayPal - FYI the new system will be based on Stripe.

3

I’ve donated before and am willing to continue to support the site – I support whatever you come up with, James

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4

Yes you have, thank you very much for that and I’m always grateful for your significant contribution!

5

maybe you can propose something wikipedia-esque that demonstrates the amount of funding necessary to maintain the site so contributors have a goal to shoot for in terms of donations? I think many here have no idea how much it costs to host and maintain a site

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6

I’m new here but have already found the site very helpful and would be willing to pay a subscription fee. I don’t know what Stripe is but I also don’t really care for Pay Pal.

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7

Hi @turnitaround , I just tried to make a donation through the PayPal link but it said they are “experiencing difficulties.” Do you still have the PayPal donation method set up to accept donations? If yes, I’ll try again later. If no, I’ll wait until you have the Stripe system set up.

For the person who commented on Stripe, they are a very large credit card processor (they do some of Amazon’s credit card processing). I deal with them in my job and they are a good company.

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8

Ooh thanks for the info.

And thanks for the intent!

Yeah wait for the stripe update :slight_smile:

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9

Thanks Manatee for that information. I’ll look forward to contributing once that’s set up as well.

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10

Hi @turnitaround , I just tried to donate to the site through the PayPal link and got an “experiencing difficulties” error message. Are you still taking donations for the site and, if so, is there a new link?

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Yes, that’s very kind of you!

Thanks for the heads up! I’ll take a look and revert on this thread.

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Just checked and it appears ok - at what stage did you see this message?