LFGSS survives by donations

Monthly donation set up. I didn't actually know my old one had lapsed.

Did they get carried across to the new forum automatically or was it a fresh start when it became microcosm?

Microcosm doesn't manage subscriptions, so effectively any that existed 3 years ago were just left there... to slowly be whittled down by time.

That's effectively what happened, over 3 years the vast majority of subscriptions expired, and because it was all ticking over and we were getting through fine, I didn't bother to nag.

But affiliates are diving, GBP is diving... each either loses us revenue or costs us more (all bills are in USD)... so it's time to build up a nice stable and predictable revenue again... lots of little subscriptions.

Donated, keep up the great work, love this forum.

I did call paypal, but they weren't terribly helpful. The problem they say is at your end.
However I usually use a security key which involves paypal sending a 6 digit key via text. I deactivated it and it worked fine, the recurring payment went through right away.
Perhaps if anyone else has the same problem that might resolve it.

However I usually use a security key which involves paypal sending a 6 digit key via text. I deactivated it and it worked fine, the recurring payment went through right away.

I think you found the real issue.

If you want to get more value out of the dollars you send to DMARCian then put "fo=1" in your DMARC record.

Thanks for the tip, done.

I see my pay pal beer expired a few months back. I'll reinstate in a couple of months once I've got over this sticky period.

Sorry about that...PayPal.Me isn't available in your country.

What's the actual PayPal address for sending the donations in?

paypal@lfgss.com

I get so much out of Brighton Bike Tag... so £5 monthly recurring, started today. Thanks for the site!

Oh done!

Manual donation went through fine :).

Done! Thanks @Velocio!

Ill do couple quid monthly, manually. Dunno how to do automated recurring donations. Cheerio!

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In the first post of this conversation... there is a link that gives you the option to set up a recurring donation.

That screenshot looks more like the prettier screen from the second link... use the first link under the "How to donate" section.

LFGSS is a 'club'.

Silly question, but let's say I donate regularly or a lump sum; can it count as a charitable donation?

I guess not as LFGSS is a sports club, not a charity, but I wanted to check.

No, not to my knowledge.

There are rules which allow the club to claim back some part of it's VAT expenditure (but as our purchases are with non-UK cloud providers we have virtually none) but doesn't classify us as a full charity.

We can voluntarily enter into several things, like Gift Aid processing as a CASC and VAT processing, but it seems that the cost of accounting for both is greater than than benefit (unless we were even larger... i.e. had over £20k revenue per year, at which point it would start to make sense).

I don't believe you can claim back as a charitable contribution if, as a CASC, we aren't actually engaged in processing Gift Aid.

Is it possible that we could sell unwanted gear and payment would be a donation to LFGSS. The seller donates carriage and goods, buyer may be inclined to pay more as he's supporting a 'good cause' as the seller. Just a thought.

Some people do this.

Some of the one-off donations are from sales of unwanted gear.

It doesn't happen often, but it happens. They just sell as usual and then donate whatever they made minus postage costs, etc.

Fuck yeah

One can simply think of it as ebay selling fees and donate a small percentage of every sale (or a monthly aggregate) to the forum - seems a fair way to go on about it.

Or if it's a giveaway, ask the "buyer" to send in a donation to the forum as a thank you note.

Shouldn't we start doing this anyway? Sales fees.

Difficult to code... will take time and effort I don't have plenty of.

Hard to enforce without code... becomes passive aggressive and a bit shitty, lots of manual effort to force people to give little amounts, and silly "please acknowledge this £1.70" type thing.

The current donation drive has fully achieved it's goal.

The month hasn't ended, and PayPal provide no reports on the total value of subscriptions, etc... but it appears that based on the current money in PayPal and that we've only got 10 days to the end of the month... that we should end the month with about £300 more than this month's cost.

The one-off donations were around ~£250 of this month's donations, and so that implies that the donation drive has met it's goal of getting enough people to sign-up to small donations to offset the GBP nosedive.... that we should be good next month, the month after and so on.

The extra £250 will just be left to sit in the account and slowly get whittled down if it turns out some months do cost more, or the donations in some months are cancelled.

Oh, and this month I increased our costs by $20 per month to add another web server to the mix. This was triggered by LFGSS being under a denial of service attack yesterday. CloudFlare is handling most of the attack mitigation, but I wanted to be able to keep other sites online if LFGSS is attacked (or vice versa) by splitting the traffic such that one of the servers focuses on the sites that aren't under attack.

figured out my paypal login, monthly beer donation made...

@Velocio How about a Shop thread, which merges prices of commonly (or even not-so-commonly) bought products sourcing prices from affiliated shops? It could be a first-stop suggestion for people intending to make purchases, as opposed to relying on people to be aware of / remembering the affiliate link thing.

Road.cc utilise something similar on their review pages.

Or is that a real PITA?