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London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@Velocio
[updated 2016-06-12]
The server upon which this site is hosted costs money.
That's OK because we generally have money in the bank from things like donations and affiliate adverts.
Our physical server costs alone exceed £700 per month. Then there are domains, SSL certificates, software licensing, cloud services for email, a part-time and cheap sysadmin (me), accountancy, the list goes on and gets duller in the process.
If we raise more than we need then the money simply sits in the bank account and we stop asking for money for a while (like we have done in the past).
You are NOT obliged to donate.
In fact I am very much of the opinion that you shouldn't donate if you can't afford to, even if you use the site heavily.
The best way for costs to be met is for many people to give a little.
The way I view this is this:
When you can, and when you feel you want to, buy the server a beer.
Which means I'd rather have 10% of active users donate £3.50 per month on average, than have 10 people give £100 each.
Why? Because it's fairer for starters. You also won't feel the price of a pint. And if we were to rely on larger donations from fewer people then we'd be exposed to the risk that if those people stopped donating we'd be screwed. So by spreading the load of what the server needs to raise, we reduce the risk to our cash flow and we keep it as cheap as chips for everyone.
Finally. There are no perks or status to be gained from donating. You get a little gold star next to your username in recognition that you are a patron of the site and a warm fuzzy feeling. It's not a popularity contest or something to beat up those who are too broke to help. It's just a "If you like this place enough, and can afford to and want to, consider buying it a beer.". That's all. The servers drink beer (until they finally make the move to single malts).
To donate.
Do so directly via PayPal.
Managing your ongoing donations.
If you have opted to donate on a regular basis (a subscription) then you can manage this via PayPal on their My pre-approved payments page. Once you visit that page, filter the list to show just the "Active" subscriptions.
Note that there should only be one active subscription for LFGSS at most, but I have found out that PayPal enabled it such that you could set up more than one, if this has occurred please do cancel the ones that you consider the duplicate and get in touch for refunds if you would like that. I will refund duplicates for as long as I have complete records in PayPal.