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It looks like you can't... PayPal is the only place to actually see a record of such things.
But I've just checked my PayPal email records and I can see that the last donation you made was 11th October 2010. So that should narrow down your PayPal search.
For those with a standing monthly/quarterly/annual donation, you can find that in PayPal at one of these URLs https://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_manage-paylist https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/customerprofileweb?cmd=_merchant-hub
I wish PayPal's tools were better at showing this stuff to you, but it's PayPal.
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Oh, and if someone is going to change their subscription frequency... it's messy but you should cancel your existing subscription in PayPal at one of the above links.
And then use the Donate page on here to create a new subscription with the desired frequency and amount.
Otherwise it is likely that PayPal will just run two subscriptions at the same time.
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how much do you need per month to keep everything ticketyboo gaffer?
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Have started spreading the word via the book of face.
I would suggest making that donate now message, larger, so that people can't just ignore it.
Right now its a bit too tastefully discreet.. -
how much do you need per month to keep everything ticketyboo gaffer?
Averaged out over a year it works out about a grand per month. Some months it's just the raw server costs (£700) and email costs (£50), other months include annual payments so those months are a lot higher.
In the last 6 months we've barely taken in half of that amount each month... meaning I'm down a few grand (I just pay it from my personal account and then put my shopping and living on credit card).
Critically though... my credit card is now max'd and I can't afford to live this month, so definitely cannot afford to pay the LFGSS server costs this month... especially not in the hope that the affiliates do their seasonal bounce and "it'll be alright".
If the affiliates do bounce during May, then great. But we're still in the negative for the last few months (leaving me out of pocket) so it doesn't save us immediately. The affiliate seasonal bounce will just mean I can go back to not bothering people about donations in the future.
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Will donate.
Also interested in how much is required, and how many active members we have.
Approx £1k per month average (monthly base figure is ~£750, servers alone are ~£700).
We have 14,715 active members.
But probably only 500-1,000 who are addicted and live on here most weeks.
It has always been true that if most people gave £1 we'd be loaded. But reality is only a core 300-400 people donate each year. The small but regular donations offer us stability, the larger one-off donations help when things are critical. We'd do best from more people giving £3.50 each month... it would be very predictable and would remove the spikes and troughs, the uncertainty.
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donated
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I think you should remove the free classifieds section.
- It would increase the quality of debate on here by reducing the amount of noise from ads akin to '£5 - Can't pay my rent' sales
- If chargeable (as a service of this nature should be), it would generate some revenue.
Agree with this.
With regards to the affiliate scheme, I need to buy some stuff for a CP. Can I just copy and paste the link into my CP thread, clink the link, purchase the goods and LFGSS gets the kick back?
- It would increase the quality of debate on here by reducing the amount of noise from ads akin to '£5 - Can't pay my rent' sales
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Any idea why the affiliate revenue is down?
Have they changed anything?
Do we just need to buy more stuff?No idea. But we're not the only ones affected by it.
I mentioned it over here: https://www.lfgss.com/thread123213.html#post4119116
But basically even eBay traders and other sellers are reporting a collapse in sales at half the expected amount.
Our revenues are based on small kickbacks (a penny here, a pound there) from sales that occur as a result of clicks from here.
If the sales aren't happening... then we aren't getting paid.
And yes, this does not bode well for Microcosm. Though in Microcosm's favour I always understood that the key was to use scale to massively push down the costs. If LFGSS cost less to run then even the reduced revenue would've been fine. But that's just not how vBulletin operates... performance and low server costs were never in the design of the software, features were.
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Is there a thread somewhere with a list of merchants that you have an affiliate account with, VB? Could it be more prominent if so? I basically always forget affiliate deals exist so you're possibly not getting as much use out of it as you should.
+1
Is it possible to have 2 'beer a month' donations set up at the same time too?
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Is there a thread somewhere with a list of merchants that you have an affiliate account with, VB? Could it be more prominent if so? I basically always forget affiliate deals exist so you're possibly not getting as much use out of it as you should.
https://www.lfgss.com/thread52983.html
It's already a sticky.+1
Is it possible to have 2 'beer a month' donations set up at the same time too?
PayPal is dumb, so yes.
But there's a downside, vBulletin is dumb too.
It is possible to create a race condition, where one subscription expires whilst another is valid and for you to lose the gold star in the interim period of time.
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Donations
Posted by
@Velocio
We're so close to moving to Microcosm that I've not chased on donations in months and months and last year stated that we were ticking over, month to month: https://www.lfgss.com/post3743785-430.html
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We are actually working on the Microcosm export and import scripts now, and so it is close. But it's still not tomorrow and our present costs are real.
The big issue: We've actually lost money every month for the last 6 months.
Our revenue comes from 2 places:
1) Affiliates (when you click on links to eBay, Rapha, Chain Reaction Cycles, Wiggle, etc and then subsequently buy something, they give us a kick back).
2) Donations (the PayPal subscriptions).
Affiliates has counted for about 70% of the costs for quite a long while, and donations cover the rest.
The affiliate revenue varies by season, dropping in the winter and regaining in the summer. And usually the summer revenue offsets the losses over winter and everything works out fine.
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The problem today is that the affiliate revenues collapsed in November (as expected, it's seasonal), but didn't then recover in Jan, Feb, Mar or April. In fact they've been between a third and half of the expected amount.
Meaning that I've personally subsidised the forum costs since November believing it would start to recover in January and have fully recovered by March. This hasn't happened.
Donate
Todat we are about half of our usual revenue for this time of year. Meaning the losses aren't being made up and I knew a crunch was coming.
As it stands, we do not have enough money in the bank to pay any of the costs this month. The crunch is here.
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And I personally cannot subsidise the shortfalls (I only receive a take home wage of £850 per month and my credit card has been taking the hit when LFGSS falls short).
We basically need to recover the revenue we've lost through donations... which means either:
1) Encouraging more people to help out
2) Encouraging those are helping out to help more
3) Some generous sod has a couple of grand spare just to put us back to above zero and cover the shortfalls of the last few months
Donate
My personal view is always going to be the "keep donations low, and voluntary, and encourage more people to help out".
So I'm going to change the site header and basically do a pledge drive for most of May.
Donate
But if you are donating already and can afford to up the amount or frequency (i.e. from a beer a quarter, to a beer a month)... then that would be incredible.
Rather embarrassed it's got this far. Each month I've watched the affiliate revenue expecting the bounce after the Christmas slump, but it just hasn't happened.
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