LFGSS survives by donations

Just set up a monthly donation. Ashamed it's taken me so long as it only took only a few clicks and less than 30 seconds. @Velocio, thank you for the work you put into maintaining the forum

Thank you, it's appreciated. It always is appreciated, far better that many people give a tiny amount then a few people give a lot... but it's always voluntary, according to means and value received.

It's also worth saying, that after being pinned on the front page for a day and bumped recently, we've gone from month-to-month just ticking over, to having 2 months reserves in the bank. We haven't been in this position for ages and it gives me confidence that should it turn out that the increased usage of the forum is sustained into the future, that we can pay the bills without sweating about it. Though mostly it buys me time to re-engineer things to avoid those costs long term.

£10 added to the pot. For the kindness of @may

Scored some serendipitous shorts: £20 in the pot.

Just set up a monthly donation, this place is invaluable for facilitating bike dorkery as therapy for me.

Is there different way to support lfgss other than PayPal for those who don’t want to use PP?

A couple of people are doing bank transfers. It's not something I want too many people doing as accounting for it is slightly more difficult on my side... but this is possible. You can DM for details.

Just trimmed down my notifications to direct @ mentions only to reduce the no of emails I get. Had no idea this would incurr a cost to lfgss.

Just trimmed down my notifications to direct @ mentions only to reduce the no of emails I get. Had no idea this would incurr a cost to lfgss.

I had no idea either! Will make some ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Thanks for the website David. Small monthly donation now set up.

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Donated. Thanks for all the hard work

This thread will be more true than ever.

I'm going to turn off all of the affiliate programs with the exception of eBay.

Why?

• They've slowly been reducing their % paid
  
• They don't contribute a meaningful revenue stream
  
• The payments are in $ and the conversion reduced it further (even though the sales were in £)
  
• Brexit changes means that they require me to be a tax registered company... which it is not worth doing, the revenue is way below the threshold for this... or for this to be classed as personal income and resulting in almost half of the earnings evaporating to the taxman whilst making my self-assessment more complex
  
  

It does not change privacy on this site as this site never used tracking on pages where links appeared, and if you had clicked a link then any cookies were set by the destination website and that would still be true.

I'm keeping eBay as they are more mature in how they do things, and recognise the VAT threshold for HMRC (they aren't enforcing VAT rules for £1 of revenue which is the sane thing), and the money conveniently gets paid into PayPal which is where the bills are nearly all paid from which sustains the good separation of my personal affairs from LFGSS monies.

Last month the non-eBay affiliates brought in £50... over the year that's semi-meaningful as it's about 1 month's worth of costs... so it does mean I will eventually nag for more donations, but at the moment we have more than we need due to the sales of t-shirts and caps last month adding a couple of months costs to the coffers.

Does that mean the links will stop being translated into microcosm.app/out links? Or what's the reason for that?

It doesn't mean that immediately, but I may change all of that so it's just eBay links.

And the reasoning for that isn't just affiliates... we've also used it to protect people on the site by blocking the links to spam and malicious sites for working, basically not redirecting them.

But after 6 years... I would say that we only stopped bad stuff a handful of times, and that browser protections against malicious sites have much improved in that time... so I'm up for just removing that layer of protection at some point too.

The forum has been a really great thing during the pandemic (and before it and, no doubt, after it). Thanks to everyone that keeps it going!

I'm going to up my monthly donation.

Better check my donation link

Uh oh @Velocio

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It just means your payment method on PayPal expired or something, so it pauses automatically

gotcha

just bumped a GPP30 because this space saves my life :)

I'm going to turn off all of the affiliate programs with the exception of eBay.

This has been done.

£60 worth of sparkly PBAS sticker money donated this week.

(still plenty of PBAS stickers left for all you peanut butter lovers out there)

Sold some tool rolls, £40 donated

edit: The donation was included in the price, so it was the buyer's generosity, not mine :)

edit: The donation was included in the price, so it was the buyer's generosity, not mine :)

And yet very appreciated.

Although... the person doing a periodic £0.01 donation via PayPal continues to gift PayPal 1p.